If I use a png file with transparent background as the app icon in iOS4, the compiler will change its background to black. How can I preserve its transparency?
Transparent application icons are not allowed. The iOS Human Interface Guidelines makes it clear that alpha transparency is not allowed and elaborates:
Give your application icon a discernible background. Icons with visible backgrounds look best on the Home screen primarily because of the rounded corners iOS adds. This is because uniformly rounded corners ensure that all the icons on a user's Home screen have a consistent appearance that invites tapping. If you create an icon with a background that disappears when it's viewed on the Home screen, users don't see the rounded corners. Such icons often don't look tappable and tend to interfere with the orderly symmetry of the Home screen that users appreciate.
Be sure your image completely fills the required area. If your image boundaries are smaller than the recommended sizes, or you use transparency to create “see-through” areas within them, your icon can appear to float on a black background with rounded corners.
I think it is impossible.
Did you specify
UIPrerenderedIcon YES
in your plist file? The standard effects would make the transparency useless...
I think transparent icons are discouraged, and I think you might have a hard time making it through the review (that is, if it is technically possible at all).
It is possible, but background will be filled by black color. And your app may be rejected by censors of App Store.
Related
I am facing a very weird problem. After my app completion, I added an Icon for my iPad app. Works fine. But as I am having Icon design some what different, some part of the iPad's default icon background is visible.
If you see, the black part behind is visible, look very ugly. I want to remove this somehow. How to overcome this?
Please help.
From Apple Guidelines:
Ensure that your icon is eligible for the visual enhancements iOS provides. You should provide an image that:
Has 90° corners (it’s important to avoid cropping the corners of your
icon—iOS does that for you when it applies the corner-rounding mask)
Does not include a drop shadow
Does not have any shine or gloss
(unless you’ve chosen to prevent the addition of the reflective
shine)
Does not use alpha transparency
So.. Dont use transparency!
You can't. However, you change the background of your icon from transparent to black.
App icons cannot use transparency. They must have a solid background colour. What you can do is make the background of your icon black, but this will still show up on coloured backgrounds.
Did you try setting "Icon already includes gloss effect" in xcode summary screen? This is probably because gloss effect blends with black giving you this look
Hope this helps
Cheers
Sometimes pdf might have a transparent background. And In my application I have given a option to choose background. So, in case of pdf with transparent background and background color black all things becomes black black so, any way to check or any key inside dictionary of pdf page that can help me? Any help will appreciated.
The easiest solution for you would be to remove black color from available background colors.
Generally, all pdf pages have transparent background and the white background color is set by the viewer application. It is possible to set a background color for each page. You can read all about it in Page Group under Transparency section of the PDF Reference.
It is also possible to show a background color for a page by setting 'BoxColorInfo' dictionary in the page dictionary with appropriate values.
But I am not sure what you can achieve by knowing what color a page background is, since black background is going to be a problem for PDFs with transparent pages anyways.
EDIT: Following is the paragraph from PDFReference i was trying to point you to:
Ordinarily, the page is imposed directly on an output medium, such as
paper or a display screen. The page group is treated as an isolated
group, whose results are then composited with a backdrop color
appropriate for the medium. The backdrop is nominally white, although
varying according to the actual properties of the medium. However,
some applications may choose to provide a different backdrop, such as
a checkerboard or grid to aid in visualizing the effects of
transparency in the artwork.
It says that most PDFs would have a transparent and it is your application which shows the background color. Hope this helps.
I just uploaded my first iPhone app. The app icon has a border, sort of like the "settings" icon. However, when I upload my large icon in iTunes connect, there are some weird white edges in the corners. It appears that they might use a smaller corner radius or something. How can I make sure it will display correctly on the apple store?
The image is a jpeg with no transparency.
Thanks for the help!
What's happening is the appstore is expecting a purely square 512x512 image. It then masks it to have rounded corners and then adds a drop shadow automatically.
If you want it to have a specific border like what you've designed you need to match their rounding exactly.
If you search around. there are PSD templates available that will help you design it (i.e. they have the exact mask that itunes uses).
Here's an example: http://www.pixelresort.com/blog/app-icon-template/
Another technique which can work really well is leaving the outer part of the icon square — in your case, the dark brown outer border would extend to the edge of the canvas – and let the roundrect mask handle the corners for you. There's a bit more info in this excellent blog post: All the sizes of iOS app icons
You'd still get the border effect, but let it be cut cleanly by the mask rather than by your icon's transparency.
I believe this to be a bug with iTunes Connect. I've seen the same problem, but it only appears on the Versions summary screen.
I've seen this when uploading a square icon. For example:
In summary, don't worry about it. Your icon should still show up correctly in the iTunes Store and on the Devices themselves. If your icon looked clean in the iOS Simulator and on your device, you're good to go.
I prepared some PNG icons, size 30*30, but with colors, not only black/white. The icons are OK when I want to display them on buttons.
It can't be shown in the tabbar.
I am wondering if the iphone only supports some simple icons (the black/white icons with lines).
Do you have any ideas?
Thanks in advance.
Michael
TabBar icons displayed in gray scale even if they are color, and iPhone uses the alpha channel for masking.
I recommend checking this site, most iPhone developers like it :
http://www.glyphish.com/
The alpha component of the image is all that is used to draw the icon on the tab bar. So you need to make sure your image has a alpha channel or it will either not show up or show up as a blank square in the tab bar.
This does mean that effectively only monochrome images can be used in the tab bar.
I'm not at my mac right now and I can't remember if it is 1.0 alpha or 0.0 alpha that shows up as white in the tab bar, or if you need to have a black or white background, but if you create an image with varying transparency it should be easy enough to work out.
I have a grayscale icon that I'm editing with Photoshop with a transparent background, but I can't, for the life of me, figure out how to convert the icon to one that can be used as an iPhone toolbar icon. If I simply save the image as a PNG, it doesn't show up as anti-aliased on the iPhone because every pixel with color is being rendered as black, instead of a shade of gray.
According to the Apple docs and other sources, there needs to be an alpha channel on the image to specify varying levels of transparency for each pixel. However, I have no idea what that means. I've read these posts and docs from Adobe and I still can't figure out how to properly convert a grayscale image into one that can be used as an iPhone toolbar icon. The blog post is hard to comprehend and poorly written, and the Adobe docs don't really help.
http://cahit.hayalet.net/blog/514/converting-an-image-to-iphone-toolbar-icon/
http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Photoshop/10.0/help.html?content=WS74B356C9-353F-4483-8632-7B1A102F2A2E.html
Can someone point me in the right direction or provide exact, step-by-step directions to doing this in Photoshop?
It's much more simple than having to muck with actual masks in Photoshop.
iPhone toolbar icons are about 30px by 30px, so make a new Photoshop file with those dimensions. Ensure the background is transparent (you can specify that when creating a new file).
Then, any pixels you draw on top of this transparency become what iOS uses for the icon. Doesn't matter what color it is in Photoshop for NSToolbar icons -- they're automatically used as masks by iOS.
Leave transparent the parts you want to show through. Save as 24-bit PNG, and chuck into XCode as usual.
For a few icons that serve as good starting examples, check out the ones I publish for free here: http://glyphish.com Just take one of the PNGs and open it in Photoshop and you'll see that it's drawn in an arbitrary color (#444444) with varying levels of opacity to create darker and lighter parts of the icon.
This is more of a photoshop question than coding but anyway, here's a suggestion.
Lunacore has a good tutorial on how to use masks.
What you want to do is:
Make sure you're background is transparent.
Create a new layer and
fill it with any solid color.
Create a mask on the solid color
layer, and fill your greyscale image into the mask. (Use your
greyscale image as the mask.)
Toolbar icons use your image as a mask. They only consider what transparancy the image has. Not what color or shade.