Setting default scale for iOS Simulator - iphone

Is there a way to set the default scale with which iOS Simulator should open, for example, 75%?
The native resolution of the New iPad is too large for my display, so I have to press ⌘+2 or ⌘+3 every single time I want to test an app while being able to see the entire screen.

I've seen questions on this before, and the answer is no. I would love it if the answer was yes, but it is not. I hope that Apple adds this feature in a future release.

Related

Apple App Store not showing correct icon in iOS 7

I've updated one of my apps to support both iOS6 and iOS7. After the update was approved, the icon for the app in search results is incorrect on iOS7.
As you can see, the icon is correct on the app page, but not correct in the search results page (you can tell by the rounded corners). It is showing the iOS6 icon in the search results.
I setup the icons for the projects with the new method that uses the Images.xcassets folder. In iTunesConnect, I uploaded the new icon, and the iTunesArtwork and iTunesArtwork#2x files are both the correct versions.
I'm fairly convinced this is an issue on Apple's end. Here is a thread on another website about the same issue:
iOS7 App store search icons. Btw, if you check various apps in the App Store, you can see that a lot of them have this common problem, the icon displayed in search results is the incorrect/iOS6 version.
Anybody know what the deal is? This is so annoying.
I had the same problem with one of my apps on iOS7. It seems it is an issue on Apple's side.
I had everything setup correctly in Xcode, but the icon displayed in search results was wrong.
In the last update I finally solved the problem. It seems Apple always takes "Icon#2x.png" for search results on the App Store. It doesn't matter what you set in Images.xcassets or Info.plist. Apple will probably fix the problem soon, for the moment you can just replace the "Icon#2x.png" file.
If you were looking for an answer to this problem, this isn't the answer you were looking for. I feel that it is too late in the game for Apple to do anything about this issue, since at this point nobody cares about iOS6. Therefore, the best course of action is to just make all icons for iOS7, meaning if you have a border in your icon, make the roundness of the border match iOS7 for all sizes. This will result in the icon looking slightly weird on an iOS6 device, but at this point that is an extremely minor issue.

Non-4-inch apps top-aligned when new splash included

Apple is now requiring a retina and 4-inch display Splash page (i.e. the "Default-568h#2x.png") for all apps to be submitted, which is fine. However, when I include that and then do another build, once I get into the app, instead of it being centered with dark on the top and bottom (as it was before), is now top-aligned on the screen with 2x the blank space on the bottom.. which looks really unprofessional.
Is there any way via our configuration to tell the OS to go back to centering the app, despite that it has the now-required 4" Splash page included? Ideally I'd like to be able to do this without updating every single IB view in the app to center it manually, as I feel the OS should still be able to do this somehow via configuration.
FYI, answers that say "update your entire app for 4"!" are unacceptable. There are clients who don't yet have a creative budget for this but still want to keep their existing app looking decent in the store. If it's not possible, then it's not possible, but that is why I'm asking the question.
Thanks in advance for any assistance on this, and my apologies if this has already been asked.
As of May 1 if your submitting this app to the app store you will be required to support both retina display's, and the new 4" screen size.
https://developer.apple.com/news/index.php?id=3212013b
You misunderstand. As of now, you must fully support the full 4" screen of the iPhone 5 and 5th gen iPod touch, in addition to retina and non-retina devices.
By adding the "Default-568h#2x.png" launch image (it is not a splash screen) you are telling the OS that your app supports the 4" screen.
You must update your app to fill the screen. There are countless existing posts about how to do that. There is no way around this. It is 100% required - no exception from Apple.
BTW - Apple announced this requirement on March 21st. Every registered iOS developer was notified of the requirement.
It isn't possible to do what you're asking with a single setting. Your best options are a bit of code that runs when you load a view to change the origin.y position, or, go through the XIB files and update the autoresizing rules so that the views expand to fill the space. You might not have budget to update the graphics resources in the app but you should be able to spend the small amount of time required on autoresizing.
The caveat to 'small amount of time' may apply to you - if you explicitly set the size of all of your views in code you've made life painful for yourself.

iOS Simulator v5.1 window is missing device frame and Home Button

Is there a way to revert the look & feel of iOS Simulator window back to how it used to look in 5.0 and older versions?
P.S. I know Cmd-Shift-H shortcut for Home Button.
For anyone who comes here with this problem, but does not read the comments, you can get it back by hitting CMD-1 (as noted above), but it will only show for the full size emulation, if you want it zoomed out, it goes away.
then you have to use the shift-cmd-H to click the home button. And you can do it twice to simulate the click-click to show running apps, and then close them. (Don't press and hold tho, that will just trigger it to keep opening/closing the running apps window)
If you have a Retina Display macbook, you must set set the display to the highest resolution to see the iPad/iPad Retina frame on the simulator.
Hope this helps someone out!
You have to Choose Hardware > iPhone, and THEN hit Command + 1...I'm surprised nowhere else was this posted in this order. Happy Coding!
I had the same issue with a previous SDK and I had to reinstall the SDK in order to have the frame back again (I needed it for some screen shots).
So I am almost sure that it is not related to the retina resolution.
Unfortunately it is not possible to bring back device frame around display - I believe it's because of necessity to save up display space when simulating iPad's retina display. Maybe some day, when MBP, MBA and other Apple's machines will have retina displays, device frame will be back ;)
Note: if someone proves me wrong and we can have device frame, I'll of course mark his/her answer as correct one :)
This page explain it all:
http://iphonedev.tv/blog/2014/2/25/xcode-fix-show-the-iphone-simulator-skin-on-a-retina-display
Option 1: Turn Off Scaling
If you scale the size of the iPhone simulator to 50% or 75% the skin will not display.
Option 2: Get a Retina Display
No retina display, no iphone frame
Just hitting CMD-1 didn't work for me, nothing happened.
However, after switching repeatedly between CMD-1, CMD-2 and CMD-3 in a quick manner, all of a sudden I got the frame back! Hope it helps others!

iPhone VS ipad development process (differences and similarities)

I am new to iOS development. I am trying to figure out these things.
A project both in iPhone and iPad. what things are same for both (coding, graphics or UI)?
Design Pattern of apps are same or different?
waiting for answer
Thanks :)
Personally, I find that the only real difference between the iPhone and the iPad is the UI and UX. Most of the code is the same for both applications. (In fact, you can even reuse a lot of code if you are doing a universal app!)
The main difference really is the screen size. The iPad is huge in comparison to the iPhone, and this difference gives you a lot more options to work with.
Another thing to note is that the iPad is usually done in landscape orientation, whereas the iPhone is done in portrait. This is not an absolute rule however, it's just the way I see it.
The graphics aren't too different between the devices, except that because of the large screen size, you can do a bit more detailed work with the iPad images then the iPhone images. (Even with the retina display, too fine detail on the iPhone is barely noticeable.)
The other thing I wanted to mention is the flow of the devices. Again, because of the screen size of the iPad, you can fit a lot more content on the screen, and therefore have to push to new views less frequently. I've worked on apps where we had 3 UIViewController's for the iPhone version, and only 1 for the iPad version.
In short, it depends really on your type of app. If you have a lot of content, and want to display it all at once, go for the iPad. If you want a streamlined, minimal approach to your app, go for the iPhone.
Again, this is all just my personal opinion. Hope that Helps!
You can use native controls without much theming and customization on the iPhone. But iPad is a bigger beast. Users use your iPad app for a longer time. iPhone apps are used for a short stint and then closed, used again for a short stint and so on.
Analytics published by Flurry showed that the average time an iPhone app is kept open is about 1.2 minutes. Design and develop it in a way that data is available as fast as you can.
iPad apps are used in a relaxed setting. While I don't have the numbers, it's probably used more often and for a longer time than an iPhone app. Themes and custom UI elements do matter a lot there
Second, iPad apps need to be supported on all orientation (or at least a minimum of two orientations)

Easy ways to crop out the status bar when taking iOS Screenshots?

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.