I have been doing a bit of testing with images today and found that I could not make a blurry PNG image, which looked fine on my desktop appear non-blurry on the iphone without doing some strange things.
It wasn't until I made the images twice the resolution, then resized them within the iphone that they appeared crisp on screen. Is that normal practice?
What say if you have a background image that you want to be non-blurry? I don't see how I can do something like upload a background image and tell it to run at half the size...
Thanks for any pointers!
I found the answer.
It turns out that pixels are not the same on the iphone and are actually at a higher resolution.
In order to make images non-blurry, I needed to basically upload images 2-3 times regular size and then make their size smaller within the CSS.
For example, if I wanted a 50px image, I uploaded a 100px image and styled in within css to have a width of 50px.
It looks like the new iPads have even higher resolutions which means you may even want to upload higher resolution images to cater to those.
A bit lame I think, but it does look nice.
I might be misunderstanding you, but if you'd like to present a crisp image on a retina phone, you can place it in a UIImageView half it's size and set the contentMode to scale to fill.
Related
I have a multiplatform iOS/Android game that I programmed in Cocos2d-x. I have only one set of images to use (I'm only after high res devices) that get scaled according to the device's resolution. For example all images are for the iPad but if you are using a Galaxy S then the image locations and scaling are affected by GalaxyS_screenWidth/iPadscreenWidth.
This works fine for all Android devices and on iPad, iPad2 and old iPhones, but with Retina iPhone there is a problem. On the iPhone 4 all my images look extremely pixelated, a result from the images being scaled to iPhone non-retina resolution then scaled back up to fill the screen.
I tried enabling Retina Mode and the images are half of their intended size (maybe due to the usage of get winsize() which uses points) and scaling manually causes other sorts of problems. I tried playing with a lot of options and attributes but to no avail, so what should I do now?
EDIT:
This is not only a graphics issue, as text gets automatically scaled down then up and appears pixelated.
EDIT 2:
Fonts are bitmaps so my bad. But I don't want to use retina as all images are already retina by default. All of my images are set up for the iPad so for iPhone 4 I just scale them down a bit. This works with Android phones.
For example I have an image, depending on screen resolution obtained through getwinsize():
If current resolution width is 1024 then image stays the same.
If current resolution width is 900 then image gets scaled by 900/1024, no problem.
If device is iPhone 4 resolution width is 480, so image gets scaled by 480/1024, then cocos2d-x automatically scales the resulting image by 2 thus the pixelation. I tried using getwinsizeinpixels, I tried multiplying the screen size, I tried many things but nothing worked out of the box unless I am to redo many of my code.
So the question is, how can I just let the damn engine treat the iPhone 4 as an Android phone with resolution of 960x640?
If you want Retina resolution images to look like Retina resolution images, then those images need to be in Retina resolution (960x480).
If you first scale down the image to 480x320 and then upscale it on the device, it will of course look blurred. You can't magically make the Retina pixels appear from a lower resolution image by scaling it up.
SI couldn't get to the bottom of it so I employed a hack. I enabled Retina Display then I scaled everything x2 through code except for the text. Sounds stupid, but it worked, and pixelation is gone. Thanks everyone who spent time trying to help me.
I tried enabling Retina Mode and the images are half of their intended size
when you enable retina support, cocos2d gets images by appending #"-hd" to their provided filenames. Such images are meant to be double the "visual" size (in iOS terms, pixels vs. points), so that they can be sort of scaled down to make full use of device resolution.
If you have a look at the CCDirectorIOS class, you will find there a couple of methods dealing with this, especially those dealing with the scalingFactor. I don't know what kind of changes you should do to make it work, but if you step into those methods and look at the value of various objects, you might find a way to modify cocos2D default behavior for your specific case.
If this seems to complicated, one thing you could try is changing the CC_RETINA_DISPLAY_FILENAME_SUFFIX so that cocos2d will not look for specially-named files for the retina iPhone, but just use the normal ones.
For example all images are for the iPad but if you are using a Galaxy S then the image locations and scaling are affected by GalaxyS_screenWidth/iPadscreenWidth.
Another thing you might try is not using winSize, but winSizeInPixels, so that when you scale down, you down do it down to the point resolution, but just to the pixel resolution (which is double the point resolution).
Hope this helps.
So, I was creating an application for iOS with Xcode 4.2.1, I don't know why all of my icons are blurry, they are in high definition, but for some reason they looks blurry and in a bad quality.
even the background images looks bad..
Please help me, what can I do about it?
This is the original button image:
This is how it looks on the application:
Make sure you saved the high-resolution images with the ending #2x.png, if they aren't they won't work. Also remember that the images needs to be twice the size of the pixles on the screen, that means a 50px x 50px-button will need a 100px x 100px-#2x-file.
Read more about retina icons in the iOS Documentation here.
You should round the origin of each image. If you place image with coordinate like (250.34, 340.21) you get blurry effect.
This is very likely to happen when you use automatic position calculation as well as center property to place your views/images.
In the simulator, use the new Debug menu to check whether your images are misaligned. If they are, use NSRectIntegral to fix their frames.
I am having a problem in iphone 4. The images used in iPhone less than 4 are fine but when I upgraded to iphone 4 the images looks distorted.
Here is the link.
The image size I have used is 320 x 480.
http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/8431/download22.png
Thanks.
The fact is that the resolution of iPhone4 is 960x640 instead that 480x320 so the image is scaled with linear (or bilinear, not sure) filtering.. the result is what you get: a blurry image.
Just redo the image with the proper resolution to solve the problem, you mainly notice these kinds of artifacts because you have rasterized text on an image..
You obtain this effect whenever you resize an image to fit a wider area of pixels: the missing pixels must be filled somehow and filtering comes into play. So you will have to consider also that part of the screen is used by the top bar to have an exact sized picture.
Create a #2x suffix to each of your png that you use.
example:
Icon.png
Icon#2x.png
The runtime environment will choose the double-resolution on retina display devices.
It looks like your original image is 480x320, but you aren't accounting for the fact that the status bar is compressing your image slightly (or perhaps it does on the iPhone4 but on the older iPhones it is cropping instead).
I'd check the image view settings for that background image.
You can see the problem at myspace.com/dejaentenduband
on an iPhone, the background image is shrunk by what appears to be nearly 50%
I haven't had this issue on on other browser. I'd expect the background to simply be cropped where it doesn't fit the screen.
Since it is unusual behavior, and apple must realise this, I'm hoping there is a pure css or HTML based solution. Should I be defining something differently or giving my page's body a particular attribute?
turns out that this has nothing to do with the viewport.
there's an article on it here:
http://www.defusion.org.uk/archives/2010/02/19/shrinking-large-background-image-bug-in-iphone-safari/
one of the limitations of an iphone is stated by Mac:
http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/#documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/CreatingContentforSafarioniPhone/CreatingContentforSafarioniPhone.html
JPEG images larger than 2 megapixels are subsampled - that is, decoded to a reduced size
Maybe you need to configure the page's viewport.
If the background image is taller than 1000px it will resize to the width of the viewport. Try reducing the height and see if this has an effect.
I just found out the easiest fix for this. Just open the image through Photoshop and save the image using the "Save for Web & Devices"..
Here is the easiest fix of ALL:
Open Fireworks, export your image as a 32 bit png, and use that png in your background. IOS doesn't scale THAT. Works like a charm, and the size is about the same as a jpg with 100% quality (slightly smaller actually)
I'm developing an iPhone app. A simple image is the background of the main view.
I've set an UIImageView in the background and set an image in, using IB.
the image is a 160dpi PNG image. It appears like CRAP in IB. When running in the simulator it is ok, crisp.
How am I supposed to work and place my controls precisely on a such poor resolution image ?
Is this a bug ?
Thanks for you help!
IB is not a tool for designing a UI, it is a tool for implementing one. It is designed to perform well rather than display well (this is more important in complex desktop UI design than mobile but the tool is the same for both). The best advice is perhaps to take a cue from the publishing world (where this is a common practice for applications that display large amounts of high resolution graphics such as Adobe InDesign) and keep track of exact measurements for controls - the x,y coordinate positions and height/width. Then you can use the inspector to precisely position controls.
Actually, the DPI is not irrelevant at all.
Change the DPI to 72 and the image will display in IB/Xcode fine.
I don't see anything like this when I work with images in IB. Maybe there's something special about your PNG file? You say that it's 160 dpi, which is fairly irrelevant. More important are what its pixel diomensions are, and how they compare to the screen size.
Maybe the UIImageView is having trouble rendering your PNG, and is for some reason using the preview icon instead? Try a different image, or try resizing your image to 480x320, with 32-bit color.
I am wondering about this as well. I don't think the DPI of the image is what is doing this, because I have a project where everything looks fine in IB on one machine, then on my laptop, it displays the way the OP is describing.
The image dimensions are the same as the iPhone screen and the view dimensions (320x480), but the image displays all tiny instead of filling up the whole dimeal nsions of the UIImageView. If I scale to fill, then the image gets all blurry, at 320x480, even though I can confirm that those are the actual dimensions of the image... It's acting as if the image itself is 320x480 of empty space with a small version of my image centered inside it... this is very strange. As I said- this is the same project that looks completely fine in IB on another machine (and when they build, they both look normal in the simulator). This also happens on my friends's macbook.
Is there some setting in IB that might be the difference?
EDIT:
Guess I spoke too soon- I went back to my other machine and noticed the same problem this time, and it indeed was the dpi. This must have been a change in one of the recent updates to xcode/IB, because I originally never saw this issue, and the image files are exactly the same... strange.