I've set my electron app icon by converting a 2014x1024 png to icns using this: https://github.com/bitboss-ca/png2icns
However, my icon looks every so slightly bigger than all the others in the "taskbar" on macOS (comes up when you cmd-tab).
Do I need to give my icon some sort of padding or something? How can I make it the same dimensions as other icons?
There doesn't seem to be any guidance on this, only on file formats and ideal dimensions (which I've adhered to already).
Related
I noticed that my app sends icons to the Windows tray with a size of 16x16 pixels--and my Vista PC I've got a doublewide taskbar that appears to show icons at 18x18. The resizing artifacts on my app's icon look awful. How can I ask Windows what size the icons should be?
Edit
I'm generating the icon dynamically, with a pixel font text overlay. It seems wasteful to generate a bunch of icon sizes dynamically, so it would be nice to avoid building an icon with all the "possible" sizes (not that I'm even sure what those are).
GetSystemMetrics(SM_CXSMICON) returns 16--the incorrect value.
GetThemeBackgroundContentRect didn't help, either.
Create your icons in multiple formats, and let Windows select the one it wants.
Here's the Wikipedia article on the .ico format.
If you really need to know, GetSystemMetrics with a parameter of SM_CXICON or SM_CYICON will tell you the width and height that Windows wants to load.
Mark's core answer is the right one: Create your icons in multiple formats and let Windows choose the right one. Don't forget to do 32x32 and 64x64 icons for HighDPI scenarios.
But SM_CXICON/SM_CYICON won't necessarily return the size that will be used in the taskbar. The taskbar chooses the right icon size for it's size (this is much more important in Window 7).
Just provide appropriately sized icons and you should be ok.
Your best bet may be GetThemeBackgroundContentRect passing TBN_BACKGROUND as iPartId for the tray notify background.
GetThemeBackgroundContentRect should return the size defined by the current theme that may be used for drawing without overlapping the borders of the parent element. If I'm reading this correctly, that would be the largest sized notification icon permissible and presumably the size that is being used.
Testing with multiple DPI settings is probably the easiest way to tell if this is returning the correct value.
Per the NOTIFYICONDATA documentation:
If only a 16x16 pixel icon is provided, it is scaled to a larger size in a system set to a high dpi value. This can lead to an unattractive result. It is recommended that you provide both a 16x16 pixel icon and a 32x32 icon in your resource file. Use LoadIconMetric to ensure that the correct icon is loaded and scaled appropriately. See Remarks for a code example.
...
...
// Load the icon for high DPI.
LoadIconMetric(hInst, MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDI_SMALL), LIM_SMALL, &(nid.hIcon));
...
So, creating icons dynamically really isn't the best option. You should provide multiple icons of different sizes statically in your program resources and let Windows choose the best one it wants.
I'm tempted to provide the highest resolution icon and let iOS scale it down as necessary. Is this a bad idea, and (if so) why?
you'll definitely want to produce files of various sizes as required by xCode. You want to make sure that the file presented when the app runs is of a high quality.
There are tools out there that will automatically create all the sizes you need for your app icon. Here is a link to the site that I use: https://makeappicon.com/
Hope that helps!
Yes, it might be bad idea. If your icon art was produced using a vector image editor (e.g., Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop with vector primitives, Sketch, etc) you best bet is to export all required resolutions yourself. In doing so, you will guarantee the best possible output for each resolution.
Keep in mind that exporting a single high resolution image and then resizing, for each required resolution, using a bitmap editor (e.g., macOS Preview) won't produce the same results.
PS. As already pointed out, I'm not sure your binary will even be accepted by Apple if missing icon data :-(
I'm trying to set an icon for my app, however the icons derived from the original image are pixelated and look bad. I tried to provide the app icon gear application with images of different sizes, however the result is still unpleasant.
Should I provide it with images of higher resolution or lower resolution to get better results?
The answer to this question links to to a matrix provided by Apple for icon sizes. Should I use these sizes strictly, consider them as a lower border not to go under, or consider them as a ceiling not to exceed?
The docs states
Table 45-1 lists the sizes required for these custom icons and images.
Use the exact sizes.
Im programming an app in xcode and something has recently come to my attention when designing app icons. Here is the current setup that I have in my project:
Right now I have a 87x87pixel image for the "29pt" option (far left of the image), I also have a 120x120 for the 40pt option(middle) and I have a 180x180 pixel png for the 60pt option(far right). This seems highly inefficient, not only this but I need to supply #2 resolution images too? Surely there is a better way of doing this?
There are a couple of approaches I've taken in the past. One way is to create your icons, etc. in GIMP, Photoshop, etc. If you need to resize them, there's a command line utility called ImageMagick which I find to be a lot easier for resizing images than setting sizes in an image editor. The command you would use for resizing is called mogrify.
Option two is to get your hands on an app called Asset Catalog Generator. You just dump your images in and it spits out the correct file sizes and naming conventions. It's probably the best $4.99 I've spent in a long time.
Update
It appears someone has written a script to create the icons, too. I haven't used it myself, so you might want to poke around and look for others.
Create your app icon (once) at a decent resolution say 1024x1024. Drop the file into MakeAppIcon (a free service) and out pops all your icons in a zip file properly sized, enhanced as necessary, and rendered. Just drop them into images.xcassets and you're done. This avoids having to tweak any icons that may be off by a pixel or two and avoids those annoying Xcode warning messages.This vendor also offer a service for bulk uploading your iTunes screenshots, but I haven't tried that yet. Luv it!
You can use the vector-based images from a PDF. Session 411 from WWDC “What’s New in Interface Builder” discussed—albeit very briefly—Xcode’s support for creating your PNG files at build time from a vectorised PDF.
There is good article on this, you can refer that as well. http://martiancraft.com/blog/2014/09/vector-images-xcode6/
(Note that this does NOT cover PDFs for icons, just for images)
I would suggest you try SquareIcon, which I believe makes creating Xcode app icon sets very easy. Just to let you know, this is my own app.
The app allows you to drop in a generic image file (like a JPG or PNG) and convert it to a .appiconset file which you can put into your project's asset catalog. This takes care of all the naming and resizing that you might have to do manually.
UPDATE 2: I might've misunderstood you. When I wrote this answer, I thought that by 'inefficiency' you meant memory consumption and the resulting app size. If you meant, that making an icon for all the sizes is a lot of work, and you're looking for a better way to do it, consider looking at Adrian B's answer instead.
First of all, no, there is no more efficient way of doing it (unfortunately). Xcode supports vector images, but they are only supported on OS X, AFAIK. On iOS it just generates all necessary images at compile time.
Second, the app icon is small. You won't save a lot of space by optimizing app icon size. If you need to decrease the app size, try finding something that really takes much space. The icon doesn't.
UPDATE: Luckily, Apple realizes, that forcing everybody to download resources that they don't need is no good. So they introduced App Thinning along with iOS 9. I haven't looked into it thoroughly yet, but the general idea is that you upload a binary containing all the resources as usual, but when your users download the app from the AppStore, they get a version containing only resources that they need.
My problem is that my application's icon seems to be resized to fit the rounded-corner mask applied when displayed on the home screen.
EDIT: Here's the image:
My image follows the guidelines in these locations (mainly that it is 120x120, and doesn't have pre-rounded corners):
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/qa/qa1686/_index.html
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iphone/conceptual/iphoneosprogrammingguide/App-RelatedResources/App-RelatedResources.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007072-CH6-SW4
I've tried:
1) Using an image catalog
2) Searching for the issue on this site. I looked through the first 5 paginations sorted by newest and can't find anyone who's had the issue...
3) Making sure that the image is specified in the info.plist
4) Checking the troubleshooting app icon issues on the apple developer site.
The icon always ends up drawn with the black edges.
Is there a way to programmatically make sure the mask is applied correctly?
Has someone else encountered the same issue?
It sounds like you might have the wrong DPI set in the icon PNG—if it’s something other than 72 (the screen’s nominal DPI in points), the system may be trying to scale it to match.
It looks like the DPI was correct. The problem was that there was a transparent background layer, wider than the image that Android Studio seemed to have added when it was run through that deployment process. The layer went unnoticed in preview because it doesn't highlight the transparency. Noticed it when I opened it in GIMP.
So it was a silly oversight on my part.