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.
Related
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.
I am new to UI design, however a client wants an app ready for both iPhone 4s & 5.
I understand the iPhone 5 will create two bars if the image is not long enough. Many people said coding it at #2x will solve the problem. But I'm not sure exactly what that means.
Do I need to design two versions? What happens if I design only for iPhone 5? Will iPhone 4S users see a squished screen?
Thanks.
First, in a couple of months you'll have to support the iPhone 5's screen size. Apple have announced that it'll be a requirement soon.
Adding a Default.png of the right size is enough to enable an app to support the new screen size but is likely not enough. You'll also need to make sure that all your views resize to fill the screen. There's the old "springs and struts" method and the newer "constraints." There are tutorials you can search for -- Stackoverflow is not a good place for that kind of thing. You'll also need to update any images.
In short, try it in the Simulator and see what happens.
Using #2x is referring to whether or not the image asset is being displayed on a 'retina' screen. For example, if you had a 50x50 pixel image, the 'retina' (#2x) version would be 100x100. This is because 1pt (point) is equal to 2px (pixel) on a retina screen.
There are a variety of ways you can determine is it is an iPhone5 or iPhone4.
In the viewDidLoad, you could check the self.view.frame.size.height to determine which background image to load based on the height of the screen. This would require you to have two different versions of the assets (not including #2x versions), i.e. bg_iphone5.png & bg_iphone4.png.
There are other ways to accomplish this, and people have explained it better than I have here - search StackOverflow and you will surely find what you're looking for.
What happens if I design only for iPhone 5? Will iPhone 4S users see a squished screen?
Don't do this. Design for both.
I've been a Flash animator for a few years and recently tried my hand at developing a simple iOS application using Flash CS6 and AS3.
When I began development I was creating for the iPhone 4S' screen size, however now with the release of the iPhone 5 the new screen size obviously doesn't fill the screen, resulting in the black-bar letterboxing at the top and bottom of the screen.
I have three questions to ask:
Is it possible to release two different versions of the app onto the App Store for separate devices or does it have to be universal? (I believe the answer is the latter but I can't find a definitive answer)
Is it possible to have a stage size that matches the iPhone 5's larger display but cut off the bottom (for example) for the previous iPhone sizes, in effect just adding some information to the bottom of the screen exclusively for iPhone 5 users?
If (2) is not possible, is there coding examples available change positions of items on the screen? For example, I have a title and taskbar as well as a background, could I code it to stretch to the size of the device screen rather than the stage? And would I need to alter the stage size or is there code available to do that for me?
I'm quite new to the programming aspect of AS3 and I'm sorry if there are answers that you feel that I should know, but I'm really thankful for your time to read and answer and I thank you in advance for your replies!
Ben Kahan
While all of your options are possible, you'll want to make sure your program dynamically lays itself out and resizes visual assets depending on screen size, pixel density and orientation.
More here:
One Application, Five Screens (Including the iPad)
and
Writing Multiscreen AIR Apps
You should look into doing number 3! 1 will be a hell to maintain, 2 will piss off users with smaller screen. If you design your application a bit more flexible, that would also mean you have an app that works on android ;)
I don't have any particular code for handling different screen sizes, but I remember reading about it back when Adobe introduced FP for mobile. This article gives a lot of good advice for delveloping for mobile (even though it is a bit old) -- maybe you can find something that is more up to date though google :)
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.
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.