I have a graphic designer who is doing some graphics for my iPhone app. Most recently she made me a background pattern and posed me two questions that I'm unsure of how to answer:
1) What should the size of the background pattern be?
-For this I know that when I'm programming my app,the screen is in terms of 320 by 480 (when in portrait mode), however is this the appropriate unit that I should give her (I'm only worried about iPhone 4 and below for now)? Like for instance, I know there is a retina display and I've seen the phone resolution of my phone also be listed as 640 x 960. I'm just confused of what the best thing to tell her regarding this is, she does not have any iPhone experience and will be using the traditional graphic programs like illustrator, photo shop etc to do the graphic design.
2) What file type should it be?
-I've read the iPhone supports mostly all of the most popular graphic file types, but is there anyone particular that would work best on an iPhone app?
The standard for iPhone resource images is PNG. If you want to target iPhone 4+ with retina display, have the designer provide two versions of the PNG: A standard version and a double-sized version which should have #2x appended after the filename, but before the extension.
So
image.png
for regular resolution and
image#2x.png
for retina resolution. iOS will automatically pick the best one to use based on the screen available.
Related
I am new to UI design, however a client wants an app ready for both iPhone 4s & 5.
I understand the iPhone 5 will create two bars if the image is not long enough. Many people said coding it at #2x will solve the problem. But I'm not sure exactly what that means.
Do I need to design two versions? What happens if I design only for iPhone 5? Will iPhone 4S users see a squished screen?
Thanks.
First, in a couple of months you'll have to support the iPhone 5's screen size. Apple have announced that it'll be a requirement soon.
Adding a Default.png of the right size is enough to enable an app to support the new screen size but is likely not enough. You'll also need to make sure that all your views resize to fill the screen. There's the old "springs and struts" method and the newer "constraints." There are tutorials you can search for -- Stackoverflow is not a good place for that kind of thing. You'll also need to update any images.
In short, try it in the Simulator and see what happens.
Using #2x is referring to whether or not the image asset is being displayed on a 'retina' screen. For example, if you had a 50x50 pixel image, the 'retina' (#2x) version would be 100x100. This is because 1pt (point) is equal to 2px (pixel) on a retina screen.
There are a variety of ways you can determine is it is an iPhone5 or iPhone4.
In the viewDidLoad, you could check the self.view.frame.size.height to determine which background image to load based on the height of the screen. This would require you to have two different versions of the assets (not including #2x versions), i.e. bg_iphone5.png & bg_iphone4.png.
There are other ways to accomplish this, and people have explained it better than I have here - search StackOverflow and you will surely find what you're looking for.
What happens if I design only for iPhone 5? Will iPhone 4S users see a squished screen?
Don't do this. Design for both.
I'm working on an image heavy web site that's essentially got three designs for multiple screens: smart phone, tablet and desktop.
The main feature of this site is background/fullscreen images. Has anyone got any recommendations regarding the suggested sizes that these background images should be?
They'll all be progressive jpegs as that seems the most sensible path for resizing and optimisation.
Handling the different images sizes will be another test, but essentially it seems sensible to handle it on the client side since this design allows for a polite loader.
I would recommend formatting for a non-retina phone such as the iPhone 3Gs at 480x320, a retina iPhone 5 at 1136x640, a retina iPad at 2048x1536, a retina mac book pro at 2880x1800. Then setup your media queries to pick the best of those sizes for non-retina ipad, standard desktop (your default image), and the Google Nexus 10 which has a display near the MBP retina (2560x1600).
For background images you will want to use media queries. For fullscreen images what I've done is implement a JavaScript module that allows you to imitate the picture element proposed by the Responsive Images Community Group. Or if you prefer you could go the "srcset" route.
There are people who insist that for changing design from TFT to Retina we should redesign all app.
But I have read that we can change only app's images ,and it's enough.
I want to know which is the best practice for it and which solution is acceptable??
Retina Display is just Apple's name for the high resolution display on some of its devices -- it's still a TFT (thin film transistor) LCD display, though.
The Retina Display has twice as many pixels in each direction as the non-Retina version. iOS features a mechanism for providing both high resolution and standard resolution images, so that the high-res versions will be used if needed. All you need to do is include high-res versions of your images with the same names and their standard-res counterparts and the "#2x" suffix. Of course, having that higher resolution available means that you might want to add detail to your images or otherwise redesign your app to take full advantage of the screen's capabilities, but it's not a requirement. In fact, you don't need to do anything at all -- your existing app will work just fine without any changes.
It depends on your app.
In many cases simply including the hi-res versions of your images will be all that you need to do.
However, if you have any custom drawing that could benefit from the extra resolution, then you'll need to considered updating that code too.
Apple recommends cropping out the status bar from screenshots submitted to the app store. Doing this manually in Preview is a very tedious and error-prone process.
Do any developers have any best-practices recommendations or automated techniques for speeding up this process? The goal would be to take as input iPad and/or iPhone screenshots, and output them with the toolbar cropped off. We need to support both portrait and landscape orientation, and Retina-resolution iPhone screens.
I've found a few utilities online that purport to help with this, but the ones I have found seem to fail on Retina-display resolution screens. And another that works via the iOS Simulator requires a 1920x1080 resolution monitor to process iPad screenshots - making it useless for non-17" laptop-based developers.
Any other recommendations for taking good screenshots for the AppStore? I know (based on my searching) that there are a lot of other developers who would be interested in a quicker workflow to handle this.
Bonus points for being able to bulk-process an entire directory.
I developed a free App, Status Barred which is on the Mac App Store. It crops your iOS screenshots from iPhone, iPad, portrait, landscape, normal & retina display.
I used the ImageMagick command line tools to batch crop all the Screenshot png files, but haven't figured out how to not use auto assigned output filenames.
convert Screenshot*.png -crop 640x920+0+40 920Screenshot.png
Here are two ways, assuming you mean status bar and not toolbar (which you probably shouldn't crop out of the screenshots).
If you have photoshop, just change the canvas size by subtracting 20 (low-res) or 40 (retina) and anchoring the bottom of the image. This works perfectly.
It's also easy in iPhoto using the Edit/Crop feature. Set the dimensions to the correct size (Portrait: 320x460 or 640x920 and Landscape: 480x300 or 960x600) and move the crop screen to the bottom of the image. This does it perfectly as well.
After much searching, the easiest tool I have found is the iOS Simulator Cropper. It does a great job of handling different resolutions and orientations, and it is painless to use. No need to muck around with Photoshop or other slow / cumbersome tools.
Link: http://www.curioustimes.de/iphonesimulatorcropper/index.html
The developer reports that they have enhanced the iOS Simulator Cropper to bulk process screenshots taken on device as well as via the Simulator. I haven't tried this yet since the update, but if it works well this will be the perfect solution.
I have also found a very useful tool in the Mac App store called "Status Barred" that also very simply crops the status bar out of any images handed to it.
How about just using Preview? Command+A to select all, drag the selection down to 920px then Tools => Crop.
I'm developing my software, all the ui is drawn based on 480x320 size screen, can my software run on iphone4 without any modification?
Yes it can run with no modification.
If you'd like to create "retina" assets you can create all of your images at the double resolution and include copies with '#2x' appended to the filename in your Application bundle. The iPhone will automatically load the correct images.
Example:
existing image - myImage.png
new up-sampled image - myImage#2x.png
Yes, but any images sized for the earlier iPhone models will look chunky compared to custom-designed iPhone 4 images.
Both the iPhone 4 and older devices are 320x480 points in size, which is the coordinate system that Core Graphics and UIKit uses. So your software will run the same.
Only the automatic scaling between your bitmaps and the display will be different. If you have bitmapped content or images, you can optionally provide #2x sized versions that will look somewhat smoother without the 2X scaling on iPhone 4 devices. This is nice, but optional.