I have been looking at SVGKit and I am finding conflicting ideas. Some say it's slower than PNG and others saying it is fast.
I was hoping to get a recommendation and which route I should take. When I am exporting my vector graphics to PNG for display, would it not make sense to use an SVG instead ?
Of course this gives the added value that it remains a vector.
Or is it still recommended in exporting everything to a PNG ?
You might consider the middle-way introduced in Xcode 7. Here you add your assets to the project as vector images (PDF) and at build-time Xcode automatically generates the PNGs in all needed sizes (1x, 2x, 3x).
Personally, I only use SVGs when necessary, like if I need to be able to change the color of the (parts of the) image. I believe there can be a performance hit when resizing vector images at run-time, although Android uses vectors as default, so it might be insignificant.
SVG is most resource intensive and can be used if you need to display something that can be zoomed in and out while PNG should be preferred for most UI graphics (logos, icons, etc.), as it is crisp yet remains lightweight and fast to display so there is no way to compare SVG with PNG in term of Performance.
if you are going after a Crystal clear images you can use pdf based graphics, which are supported by Xcode Using Vector Images in Xcode
if you still need to implement SVGKit i always suggest using some tools (like SVGCleaner) to clean and simplify SVG in order to enhance performance.
Related
I am into iOS development from past 1+ months and what I have experienced is that I have to put images for 1x 2x 3x for iphone and then 2x retina for ipad. One of the experienced designers has sugguested to me to go for svg format as it scales itself according to the screen sizes.
So my elaborated questions are:
Can I use svg instead of png?
Is it necessary to still put images in 2x and 3x for iphone and ipad if I'm using svg?
Will the images in svg scale according to the phone size and not lose quality?
If any other information according to your experience please share.
Thank you.
Official iOS Dev documentation says "the PNG format is the one most recommended for use in your apps". You can read it for a lot more information here.
Yes, although the supported file types table doesn't list it. Apple values user experience. SVG scaling consumes a few more CPU cycles which they don't like. PNG rendering is more efficient than SVG.
Yes, Apple explicitly recommends using multiple versions of the image at different sizes. Then scaling can be done from the file having the nearest dimensions.
Refer 1. There are cases like zoom-in / out scenarios where SVGs would be better though.
You could use vectorized PDFs alternatively. You can read more here. It isn't without limitations, but with vectorized PDFs, Xcode automatically generates scaled versions. That should make life easier. Note that sometimes the scaled results look quite poor.
Icons Are Pretty Right?
I'm working on an UI update in an iOS app, and trying to make things look a bit better with some new icons- but I seem to be incapable of determining how to save an image correctly so that it looks good in the interface!
As you can see from this image, if I include a white background with the image it looks great. If I take those same images and use an alpha background they look terrible! It appears that either the images aren't using the #2x correctly, or something else is going horribly wrong.
These images are either saved with GIMP as a png with alpha, or exported from inkscape, the originals are vector graphics. We get the same results from both avenues. I am using both a base imageName.png and imageName#2x.png for scaling.
Somehow, magically, I changed the a single image to greyscale in gimp, and changed the base size to 25px and it showed up with alpha correctly blended. Stock images from apple are also functioning correctly, so it absolutely seems to be something that I'm doing incorrectly when I'm saving the images.
The Setup in XCode
Basic Questions
Is there a certain bit depth, argb vs rgba format, or some other quirk that I need to know to get these images to show up correctly? Is there any way to verify that the program is loading the correct imageName#2x vs imageName? Is there some document that talks about integrated graphics (the iconography documentation isn't very helpful on technical details)
Actual Images
With Background:
Without Background:
I think you will find success if you just save the image at 4x the size you actually want and specify the size manually.
My app requires that each user has a profile picture of around 140*140px. Right now I am using jpgs, I am wondering if performance wise it will be better to use pngs. I read pngs are good for small UI elements and images, jpg for large images with detail such as photos. Obviously my profile pics are photos but they are small. Would it make much difference switching to png? Thanks
JPEG is best for small file sizes of photos, even for low resolutions.
PNG makes sense when there are many pixels of the exact same color next to each other. This is not the case with photos.
These should be helpful for you.
When to use PNG or JPG in iPhone development?
PNG vs. GIF vs. JPEG vs. SVG - When best to use?
Apple optimizes PNG images that are included in your iPhone app bundle. In fact, the iPhone uses a special encoding in which the color bytes are optimized for the hardware. XCode handles this special encoding for you when you build your project. So, you do see additional benefits to using PNG's on an iPhone other than their size consideration. For this reason it is definitely recommended to use PNG's for any images that appear as part of the interface (in a table view, labels, etc).
As for displaying a full screen image such as a photograph you may still reap benefits with PNG's since they are non-lossy and the visual quality should be better than a JPG not to mention resource usage with decoding the image. You may need to decrease the quality of your JPG's in order to see a real benefit in file size but then you are displaying non-optimal images.
File size is certainly a factor but there are other considerations at play as well when choosing an image format.
I have a question about png-8 vs png-24 usage vs Xcode's built in "image compressor".
Some images converted to png-8 are just fine saved like that, because difference between png-24 version can't be noticed easily. But some images have to be stored as png-24 so that quality remains at high level... Same image is about 3 times smaller when saved like png-8, so I guess there would be some benefits in memory consumption when using png-8 vs png-24. But what I am not sure is:
Does iOS "likes" more png-24 ?
Are there any problems with using png-8 instead of png-24 in iOS and what is a preferred choice ?
What are benefits to optimize image in PS (or some program like TexturePacker) when COMPRESS_PNG_FILES in Xcode is set to YES because I suppose Xcode in some way overwrites our optimization done in PS?
What actually Xcode does when optimizing images?
I know that just letting Xcode to do what it suppose to do is probably more than enough, especially for newer devices with enough memory and cpu power, but I am curios what's happening "under the hood" and is it wasting of time doing optimization in Photoshop?
Does iOS "likes" more png-24?
iOS certainly likes its images to be close to its own hardware format (see below). However, it may not presume a certain format, or convert images at will. This would mean that the default postprocessing could convert images from palettized (8-bit) to true-color images, and that would be destructive if the application expects its images to contain a palette. There are many good & proper uses of palettized images.
Are there any problems with using png-8 instead of png-24 in iOS and what is a preferred choice?
Color depth - higher is better, for some kinds of images (but not all). Size - smaller is better (and for deciding when, you are on your own). Other than Sangony states, the PNG specification is generous enough to allow more than a single bit of alpha even in indexed mode. That is, the usual RGB palette may also be RGBA, including alpha. I am not aware of any "problems" with more common PNG formats, or even the uncommon ones.
What are benefits to optimize image in PS (or some program like TexturePacker) when COMPRESS_PNG_FILES in Xcode is set to YES because I suppose Xcode in some way overwrites our optimization done in PS?
Photoshop is not extremely good at optimizing PNGs, but then again it's certainly not one of the worst. pngcrush (the original) is written specifically to try and squeeze the very last byte out of a PNG -- but at its highest setting, it can really take a while to do so. I may have used Apple's modified pngcrush unknowingly, since it is "on" by default; I have not found such a huge delay when compiling code, so Apple's default may be not the highest possible setting. This suggests that manually running pngcrush could be worth the time, in which case you definitely do not want XCode to undo it.
What actually Xcode does when optimizing images?
The most visible 'optimizations' are: switching storage order from RGB to BGR and discarding the alpha channel by premultiplying it with the color channels. See also my earlier answer.
The storage order thingy is, presumably, optimal for the default target devices (iPads, iPhones). Premultiplying alpha is a common method of optimizing, because then it takes less calculations to display the images in real time. (There are some disadvantages to it as well.)
Without any exact measurements, one can only speculate if these optimizations really matter on modern hardware. All internal conversions to 'display' format may very well be cached as quickly as possible.
Xcode uses PngCrush behind the scenes to optimize .png files. Here is also a good blog post that can answer your questions.
Aside from the available colors between PNG8 and PNG 24, the main difference is the the transparency aspect.
PNG8 alpha can sometimes be somewhat jagged in appearance whereas PNG24 is much smoother. If alpha is not a concern for you and the image looks good enough, then PNG8 is probably the way to go.
PNG8 Alpha
PNG24 Alpha
My app uses flat graphics, which mostly consists of lines and flat surfaces...
Whats the best approach for building the UI?
use PNG images as much as possible (like for the attached picture, the whole background would be an image)
use 4 UIViews (in this example case) with background color to make the background and the 3 lines
use CoreGraphics to actually draw in drawRect (or somewhere else?)?
subclass UIView and draw PDF content
any other approach?
What are the performance impacts? The advantage of the first two, is that they can be done in IB, but is there a downside (like performance or quality or caching)? I also heard of a trend of using CoreGraphics for drawing all the time...
So basically the fastest way is to use PNG files (stretchable and normal), also if you are using PNG files it will be easy to change the design and fix eventual bugs.
When you are using PNG files, try to reduce the size of the PNGs (stretchable images for backgrounds) for a better performance and a small size of the app.
CoreGraphics is more complex and can add strange bugs or performance problems if you don't know what you are doing, but can be use also for simple view styling.
On every project that I've done I couldn't use only one of these two because of the project complexity or because I was to lazy to open photoshop and add extract some designs.
As H2CO3 said is not that simple. Each format suits particular requirements, there are no written laws, I just ca tell you what I do.
Small pieces of UI, such as buttons, icons etc: I normally use PNG or PDF. You can subclass a UIView to draw PDF vector content. The plus with PDF is that if the source is a vector image, you could not take care about physical-logical points.
Images or Hi-res images, such as image of a content: In this case I use JPG, for they small size respect of PNG. They take little bit more to decompress but usually the size is very smaller compared to PNG.
In general PNG can use alpha, JPG no
Image is a big topic, nowadays I always try a way to find symmetry in UI elements and use stretchable UIImages with PNG.
For you example I will use PNG witch stretchable left and right side. Instead of use 640 px image, you can use 10 px image, with stretchable right margin and stretchable left margin.
[update]
It should be said that if you use stretchable images you will get a lot of performance boost, since the image will be smaller, you will occupy less memory on the "disk", less memory on the heap thatnks to the GPU stretching and less decompressing times
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