Disclaimer: I know the question of locking orientation has been asked, and solved. But that's only half my question.
I'm building an iphone website for a small indie game developer. They want to be able to show off screenshots from some of their iphone games. This is somewhat of a problem though. All the screenshots are taken from the game in landscape mode, so it really doesn't make any sense to display them in landscape.
Currently I have a very lightweight lightbox-style display for the image. You click a button on the site, and the image pops up (through ajax magic!) to occupy the full screen. Clicking anywhere on the image makes it go away, as if you had never viewed it.
I'm thinking that the two most practical solutions are either: a) lock iphone orientation for the duration of displaying the image; or b) do some very sneaky rotation on the image when the phone rotates, so no one ever notices. Are either of these possible/feasible? If so, could you give me any tips? And if not, has anyone solved a similar problem?
A demo of this is available at my personal server.
My $.02
As a personal design decision - I would have two images, and switch them as the rotation changes from portrait to landscape. Locking orientation seems so unfriendly. As some extra eye candy, You may want to put some sort of transition image in there between image swaps.
Here is something that may help .. http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/4912
Related
This is my first iPhone application. So I have this long list of doubts :-)
My application has a UItableView on the first tab and a Contact us page on the third tab. In both these tabs I display images.
For the UITableView i get images from the server and for the contact us page I have a set of static images of my client.
My question is, is there any specifications on the quality of these images that I should follow to get my App approved in Appstore?? These images are readable, but not of high resolution.
I know there are guidelines on the Tabbar icon images, the splash screen images. But what about the static images and the images i receive from the server?
Guidance or help would be appreciated :)
There are specifications based on display. However it is not mandatory to support both the displays (normal and retina).
You may want to dig more into the HIG. If you don't have images of double resolution then on the retina display the appearance of the app may be bad.
However you can use any image(barring other violation like DRM, copyrights etc) in your app.
Approval is also based on a large number of parameters. The images may not be a part of it.However they will specify it explicitly if rejected.
Have fun.
If you feel the image is good then use it.. Apple wont gonna reject your app due to images.
But just keep in mind that there are few icons defined by apple for specific purpose like action icon for opening actionsheet, camera icon for opening camera console or wallpaper.
Just keep in mind that you are not changing the behaviour of the predefined icons....
Rest all is fine..
Happy iCoding...
I have a universal iPhone/iPad app that I'm in the process of completing. This is a music listening app that connects to and allows you to listen to music off of a user composed music site.
Since the user base for this app will be very small I've decided to put iAds in to try and get a little recovery on the programming costs.
The app is xib-less meaning that I create all components and draw every view manually. I have all of the code in place to place the iAd on screen and off screen for its various states. My app supports all rotations of all devices and my screens correctly reposition all components for every possible orientation.
After digging deep in the documentation I found that Apple always displays tapped on iAds in portrait mode. If my device is in portrait mode (upright) then there is no problem. However if I'm in landscape or upside down (yes it makes sense for this app), then the iAd displays in portrait but when closed my app is a mess.
The best way I can describe it is that each of my display items has a frame which I manually set to position it where I want it for each orientation. This works perfectly until the user taps on an iAd. The modal iAd dialog comes up then after it is closed even if I force a reposition of my components nothing draws correctly.
I've checked the view frame coordinates before and after the ad and I see some minor shifting. But what is so strange is that my components even when forced to their frame locations I desire are just a mess.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Here is a link to the screen movie incase
embedding doesn't work: http://www.screencast.com/t/1pSwUI3EiMF
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.
So after wasting many hours trying to get my app to run in landscape mode by defualt I'm looking for an alternative.
My idea is to create the app in portrait mode but rotate everything by 90 degrees, the player thinks that he is playing the game in landscape mode (when really I've just rotated everything). I recognise it will be a little awkward to develop but I come into all sorts of issues when I try to program for landscape.
My question is, does Apple frown upon this? Could they reject my app for any reason or is this safe to do? Are there any issues I should be aware of?
Advice/articles/help all appreciated.
I do not allow landscape mode in my applications and none of them have been rejected. Sometimes an application does not benefit from being in landscape mode.
EDIT: The same also goes for portrait mode. If your app makes sense only in one orientation or the other, Apple will not reject you.
There is a key you can put into your Info.plist to make it start in landscape (see here). Or have you already tried that?
There are reportedly immersive full screen Open GL games that hide the status bar and do this. Note that you will still need to detect and handle landscape-left and landscape-right rotations or your app might appear upside-down.
Just set an affine transform on your top-level view, and be careful to always use the correct coordinate system.
I'm not a super awesome designer so this new paradigm has me a little cranky. The iPad is not supposed to have a standard orientation, and should/shall display screen contents at whichever orientation the user decides. This has me sort of stumped. I can keep my UI designed the way I want it in landscape mode, but switching to portrait, I just can't determine the best way to present app content.
I know it's all speculation at this point, but what are the chances we can override the autoRotateToOrientation to only include the orientation of our choice? Apple ignored the HIG on a lot of issues for iPhone, including splash screens, saving state, etc.
I know we can't really argue with Apple, but doesn't it sound slightly ridiculous to reject an app because it won't rotate to portrait?
I've come a long way porting some code to iPad and it works great in landscape mode. I guess only time will tell. What do you all think?
This video: Designing for the iPad from the free Stanford iPhone Programming course might interest you.
If you also registered for the paid iPhone developer program, then I believe there's also the HIG available for the iPad in the site.
Why not design your UI to be fluid? Keep the most important elements high in the hierarchy and let the others flow further down the screen when viewing in portrait mode?