Saving pictures for use in iPhone and Android applications is a real bore.
Having to make 2 separate versions for iPhone is tedious enough and then creating 3/4 versions for android (or more) is just as difficult.
Is there no way to make one set of pictures in photoshop and have them save in the various formats and sizes for iphone and android?
For instance creating them at the highest resolution necessary and it does all the resizing and such automatically (as if you were to change the image size).
Or am I really going to have to refactor each and every image in my apps?!
Thanks
Tom
I think Adobe Device Central and actions/macros in Photoshop may help you to solve your task.
Related
I've made an "magic" app with a lot of coins/playing-cards.
Therefore I have a lot of images of coins, dollar bills, playing cards etc. (regular + retina resolution)
This results in a relative big file size of the final app, which I would like to avoid; since it can't be downloaded without a wifi-connection.
Currently it's 48.6 mb when downloading it from the App Store.
The images (100+) is all .png's saved in two versions, for the regular and retina displays.
Is there anyway to optimize this and reducing the final file size of my app?
I've considdered only storing the big (#2x) .png's and the scaling them accordingly.
I have had a lot of success using ImageOptim to compress the size of images in my application.
Also, if your images are png-24, you can reduce them png-8 and save a lot of space as well. png-8 doesn't support transparency though.
Why save 2 sizes? Do you have to display so many at a time that loading the retina version takes up too much memory on a 3G? Personally I don't think you should still think of supporting such an old device. Apple also dropped support for it a while ago and it really is lacking the memory for some decent applications.
Also, have you tried using some tools to compress your images without the users noticing it? like photoshop "save for web & devices", or yahoo's services etc.
why do you need to store TWO versions of images? Just use hires imges in regular displays. Or, if you whant so, you can distribute 2 apps...
Are you shure, that your images has necessary sizes? i mean retina display has 680x920 pixels. if you are don't zooming images, you don'n need to make them bigger. And in this case, mb *.app file, in archive... there must be 1000 images...
Images that I add to the layer in Cocos2d look pixelated around the edges of the image (i.e. a hillside, the rounded part of the hill, where the sky and the hill meet). I don't know if it's the image quality, or just because the graphics processor on my 'older' MacBook Pro is not as advanced as the iPhone 4 or iPod Touch 4 or iPad 2. Is it because of that?
I have ran into an instance where a large resolution image was being used in the context of a locally packaged HTML file in a UIWebView. The image looked fine in the simulator, but when ran on a hardware device, a bug was exposed in the rendering engine where it would invert the colors. Here's a bug report as an example of this. The solution was to scale the image down a bit in photo editing application.
While an extreme corner case, this is an example of the simulator not quite living up to how things will work on a hardware device.
The simulator usually does a pretty good job representing what the final image will look like. For the image quality on a normal computer to be worse than that of an iPhone for it to make a large enough difference, your MacBook Pro has to be really bad. So I doubt it.
However, if you really want to make sure, the best way to check would be to transfer the image you are using to another machine to see if it still looks pixelated. If it does, its a problem with your image.
Hope this helps and good luck!
I'm about to start a new iphone/ipad project which required a library of images. I've been trying to find if there are any pieces of software which would automatically resize images and save them in the right format for iphone and ipad... no such luck as yet!
So, I have large images of all different sizes. I need to create three images from each one.
iPad, iPhone (high res), iPhone (normal res)
I was thinking of recording something in Photoshop, but wondered if there's anything out there which already does this? My trouble is that I need to resize based on either the width or the height (which ever is larger).
Thanks for any tips!
Unless all your graphics are rasterized it might be better to do the resizing through Photoshop, that way you don't lose the pretty vector resizing. In Photoshop, I'd recommend checking out Export Layers to Files and Layer Comps to Files under File>Scripts. They've both proven invaluable while dealing with massive image libraries for universal apps.
How about some batch image resizer freeware, like this?
http://www.fotosizer.com/
A question for the seasoned iPhone developers, what is your preference for graphics in an iPhone app? I have turned to PNGs because I read that is the preferred image format and they are the most efficient format for the OS in terms of performance. However I had read you should try to use svg graphics so they scale up on the iPad. I started reading up on svg for my next app and thought the format was natively supported by UIImageView, but it seems you can only render them in UIWebviews or programatically. My belief was a lot of the latest graphically-rich apps used svg graphics, is that an incorrect assumption?
Thanks for any advice/comments.
I think using SVG graphics would cause a ton of problems and I'm not aware of any apps that use it. It's probably a much better idea to use PNGs and just have different sizes for iPhone, iPhone 4 and iPad.
For example, preparing a launch screen of 320 x 480 would have to be changed....
How is that going to work for us? Are programmers always going to have to be submitting a high-res that will be scaled down for old devices such as the iphone 3g?
The size of the screen is basically 4 times on a pixel by pixel basis. So each pixel of your image for example gets boosted to 4.
What this means for you? You don't have to change your App, your app will scale to the hi res screen for you, same with your UI and images within your UI. Of course if you want to take advantage of the better screen quality you will have to submit hi res images.
I haven't looked at going the other way but I believe it would be a similar case.
One exception to this is text. It automatically scales to the higher res for you for free. So text will look super sharp. One problem with this is if your loading image has text based on the original load screen that wouldn't look the same as when the high res text loads.
Strictly speaking, anyone who's seen the documentation on how they're handling this is still under non-disclosure until Monday, when the new iOS ships.
Suffice to say, it's clever. You'll be able to put both high and low-rez versions of ALL your images into your app, and then load them into your app in a way that's totally transparent from the code side. The device will make its own call about which version of the image is appropriate for the kind of screen it's got.
Now that the WWDC 2010 videos are available for free to any registered iPhone developer (or ADC member), I recommend watching Session 134: Optimize your iPhone App for the Retina Display for a full description of what you need to do to support the iPhone 4's new display.