I'm new to the whole world of coding, and actionscript 3 is my first real experience, so sorry if I don't understand your answer straight away.
I've built an iPhone app using Adobe Flash CC in AIR for iOS. All the code is either in the timeline or separate .as files (so not using documents classes).
The core concept of the game is randomly generated objects fall from the top of the screen and the user has to tap them to make them disappear before they touch the bottom.
My problem is my document size is 640 x 960. I think this fits the iPhone 4 (haven't tested that) but when I test it on my iPhone 5s I get back bars at the top and bottom. Obviously they have different screen sizes but I want the app to be able to run on many all the different size iPhones.
I have spent hours googling this and still don't understand what I'm meant to do. I've tried playing around with the stage.scaleMode settings but nothing changes. I have also added a file called default-568h#2x.png (just a green rectangle with the dimensions 640 x 1136) in the included files but this doesn't show either.
So essentially I want to know how to change my app and AS3 code to allow my app to fit all the different size iPhones?
Any help would be very much appreciated.
LAUNCH IMAGES
First, before anything else, you need to make sure you have the correct launch images included in your project.
Here is a table from Adobe's website:
Default~iphone.png | iPhone 4 (non-retina) 640 x 960 Potrait
Default#2x~iphone.png | iPhone 4, 4s 640 x 960 Potrait
Default-568h#2x~iphone.png | iPhone 5, 5c, 5s 640 x 1136 Potrait
Default-375w-667h#2x~iphone.png | iPhone 6/7/8 750 x 1334 Potrait
Default-414w-736h#3x~iphone.png | iPhone 6+/7+/8+ 1242 x 2208 Potrait
Default-Landscape-414w-736h#3x~iphone.png | iPhone 6+/7+/8+ 2208 x 1242 Landscape
Default-Landscape-812h#3x~iphone.png | iPhone X 2436 x 1125 Landscape
Default-812h#3x~iphone.png | iPhone X 1125 x 2436 Portrait
Once you have those images made (and named exactly as shown), include them in your project (They have to be in the root of your application) by doing the following:
In FlashPro
go to your publish settings
go to the AIR for iOS Settings.
Go to the "General" tab
add all those images to the "included files" list (the root)
SCALING YOUR CONTENT
OPTION 1, FILL AND CROP
If you don't mind cropping your content a little bit, you can just do this when your app starts:
stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_BORDER
This will scale your swf so it fills the whole screen while keeping aspect ratio. It's pretty easy to figure out how much padding you need to make this method work well for the small variations in aspect ratios for the various iPhones.
However, if you want to allow orientation changes (portrait to landscape), the cropping will likely be too severe.
OPTION 2 - RESPONSIVE DESIGN
The best way to accommodate varying screen resolutions and aspect ratios though, is to make your application responsive. This involves the following code at the start of your application:
stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT;
Now your stage bounds (stage.stageWidth & stage.stageHeight) will be the full width and height of the device*. (some devices still have a software toolbar at the bottom or the top band)
You can then position things through code.
If you want an easy way convert what you have (you don't want to use code to resize and align absolutely everything), just put all your content in a container MovieClip with an instance name of container, you could then size and position it like this:
//scale the container as big as possible while still fitting entirely in the screen:
//figure out which dimension should match the stage (widht or height)
if(container.width - stage.stageWidth >= container.height - stage.stageHeight){
container.width = stage.stageWidth;
container.scaleY = container.scaleX;
}else {
container.height = stage.stageHeight
container.scaleX = container.scaleY;
}
//center it on the screen:
container.x = (stage.stageWidth - container.width) * 0.5;
container.y = (stage.stageHeight - container.height) * 0.5;
It's also a good idea to listen for resize events, in case the screen size changes (eg you maximize/restore on desktop, or go from portrait to landscape on mobile).
You do that by listening for the resize event on the stage:
stage.addEventListener(Event.RESIZE, redrawScreen);
function redrawScreen(e:Event):void {
//resize everything as the window size has changed.
}
You the coder are in charge of providing different solutions for different screen sizes. You check the device size and then you present the content accordingly. All in all it is not that different from showing different content based on rotation. If you hope for a magical solution that would do all that for you in AIR you are out of luck cos there's none.
Messing with the stage scalemodes is not recommended (you should always use no scale on mobile) as you then give up completely the ability to compare the position of your displayobject according the the real physical device size (basically you won't know for sure if whatever you display is in the screen or completely out of it).
If you thought developing for mobile was easy (not just using AIR but using any technology) then sorry, it's not especially cos you have to handle all those sizes.
The basic principle on how to deal with it:
get the real device size.
calculate the real density/ratio.
Compare that size to the size of your app. (again scale mode to no scale)
Extract a general ratio (size of your app compared to size of device)
Use that ratio to either, scale and place your main container (a container that contain your entire app), hard: scale and place all your DisplayObject in your app.
Since the app ratio is maintained fill the blank space with whatever.
Your app is filling correctly the entire screen on any device.
I'm new to the whole world of coding, and actionscript 3 is my first real experience, so sorry if I don't understand your answer straight away.
I've built an iPhone app using Adobe Flash CC in AIR for iOS. All the code is either in the timeline or separate .as files (so not using documents classes).
The core concept of the game is randomly generated objects fall from the top of the screen and the user has to tap them to make them disappear before they touch the bottom.
My problem is my document size is 640 x 960. I think this fits the iPhone 4 (haven't tested that) but when I test it on my iPhone 5s I get back bars at the top and bottom. Obviously they have different screen sizes but I want the app to be able to run on many all the different size iPhones.
I have spent hours googling this and still don't understand what I'm meant to do. I've tried playing around with the stage.scaleMode settings but nothing changes. I have also added a file called default-568h#2x.png (just a green rectangle with the dimensions 640 x 1136) in the included files but this doesn't show either.
So essentially I want to know how to change my app and AS3 code to allow my app to fit all the different size iPhones?
Any help would be very much appreciated.
LAUNCH IMAGES
First, before anything else, you need to make sure you have the correct launch images included in your project.
Here is a table from Adobe's website:
Default~iphone.png | iPhone 4 (non-retina) 640 x 960 Potrait
Default#2x~iphone.png | iPhone 4, 4s 640 x 960 Potrait
Default-568h#2x~iphone.png | iPhone 5, 5c, 5s 640 x 1136 Potrait
Default-375w-667h#2x~iphone.png | iPhone 6/7/8 750 x 1334 Potrait
Default-414w-736h#3x~iphone.png | iPhone 6+/7+/8+ 1242 x 2208 Potrait
Default-Landscape-414w-736h#3x~iphone.png | iPhone 6+/7+/8+ 2208 x 1242 Landscape
Default-Landscape-812h#3x~iphone.png | iPhone X 2436 x 1125 Landscape
Default-812h#3x~iphone.png | iPhone X 1125 x 2436 Portrait
Once you have those images made (and named exactly as shown), include them in your project (They have to be in the root of your application) by doing the following:
In FlashPro
go to your publish settings
go to the AIR for iOS Settings.
Go to the "General" tab
add all those images to the "included files" list (the root)
SCALING YOUR CONTENT
OPTION 1, FILL AND CROP
If you don't mind cropping your content a little bit, you can just do this when your app starts:
stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_BORDER
This will scale your swf so it fills the whole screen while keeping aspect ratio. It's pretty easy to figure out how much padding you need to make this method work well for the small variations in aspect ratios for the various iPhones.
However, if you want to allow orientation changes (portrait to landscape), the cropping will likely be too severe.
OPTION 2 - RESPONSIVE DESIGN
The best way to accommodate varying screen resolutions and aspect ratios though, is to make your application responsive. This involves the following code at the start of your application:
stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT;
Now your stage bounds (stage.stageWidth & stage.stageHeight) will be the full width and height of the device*. (some devices still have a software toolbar at the bottom or the top band)
You can then position things through code.
If you want an easy way convert what you have (you don't want to use code to resize and align absolutely everything), just put all your content in a container MovieClip with an instance name of container, you could then size and position it like this:
//scale the container as big as possible while still fitting entirely in the screen:
//figure out which dimension should match the stage (widht or height)
if(container.width - stage.stageWidth >= container.height - stage.stageHeight){
container.width = stage.stageWidth;
container.scaleY = container.scaleX;
}else {
container.height = stage.stageHeight
container.scaleX = container.scaleY;
}
//center it on the screen:
container.x = (stage.stageWidth - container.width) * 0.5;
container.y = (stage.stageHeight - container.height) * 0.5;
It's also a good idea to listen for resize events, in case the screen size changes (eg you maximize/restore on desktop, or go from portrait to landscape on mobile).
You do that by listening for the resize event on the stage:
stage.addEventListener(Event.RESIZE, redrawScreen);
function redrawScreen(e:Event):void {
//resize everything as the window size has changed.
}
You the coder are in charge of providing different solutions for different screen sizes. You check the device size and then you present the content accordingly. All in all it is not that different from showing different content based on rotation. If you hope for a magical solution that would do all that for you in AIR you are out of luck cos there's none.
Messing with the stage scalemodes is not recommended (you should always use no scale on mobile) as you then give up completely the ability to compare the position of your displayobject according the the real physical device size (basically you won't know for sure if whatever you display is in the screen or completely out of it).
If you thought developing for mobile was easy (not just using AIR but using any technology) then sorry, it's not especially cos you have to handle all those sizes.
The basic principle on how to deal with it:
get the real device size.
calculate the real density/ratio.
Compare that size to the size of your app. (again scale mode to no scale)
Extract a general ratio (size of your app compared to size of device)
Use that ratio to either, scale and place your main container (a container that contain your entire app), hard: scale and place all your DisplayObject in your app.
Since the app ratio is maintained fill the blank space with whatever.
Your app is filling correctly the entire screen on any device.
I have a simple view with a text and an Image. I ran this app on iPhone6Plus and iPhone5. Then I made a screenshot of both and enlarged the iPhone5 screenshot such that it matches the size of the screenshot from iPhone6Plus. Here is the result:
As you can se the size of the text the size of the image and there positions are not identical but they should be to look the same on different screen sized.
Here is an example of a weather app running on different screens:
As you can see the sizes and the positions of text and image are identical.
The image is loaded from asset catalog:
imageView.image = UIImage(named: "shower3")
self.view.addSubView(imageView)
imageView.center = self.view.center
I have only created a 128x128 image and put it into the #1x version in the asset cataloge.
Let me rephrase this. I run the wether app on iPhone5 make ascreenshot and iPhone6 make a screenshot. Then I resize both screenshots to the same size. Then I see that both fontsize as well as images dimension are exactly equal on both screenshots. This means that on each device font and image must have different dimensions. How can I do that?
How can I achieve that text and image have identical proportions on different screen sizes? How does the Weather App do it?
Images
I am the creator and one of the developers of the Swift Weather app. The app doesn't use three versions of images because I didn't make those images and it was a Pull Request from another developer. I don't have the origin images.
As #Daniil Korotin mentioned, iOS uses points to calculate image and font sizes. iOS uses let screenScale = UIScreen.mainScreen().scale to retrieve the screen scale and pick up the proper size (1x, 2x or 3x) of the image. If we don't provide the proper size of the image, for example, in SwiftWeather app, we have only 1x version of the image (as the screenshot below), iOS will upscale the image to render on retina devices. On iPhone 6 Plus, it actually does downsampling for 3x assets. Please have a look at iPhone 6 Screens Demystified. In some case, if you don't provide 2x or 3x images, on retina devices, the image upscaled from 1x may looks blurry. We should always provide 1x, 2x and 3x images if possible.
Fonts
iOS renders fonts according to the specified points. It will automatically convert the points to certain pixel based on the devices' screen scale (as mentioned above).
How can I achieve that text and image have identical proportions on different screen sizes? How does the Weather App do it?
The answer is Auto Layout
You can see we set constraints for the image view (used for the weather icon) as below.
The width and height are always 150 points, please notice it is points nor pixels. It will render the same size (for look and feel, not for exactly pixels) for different devices. For your first image (iPhone 6 Plus vs. iPhone 5), it looks different because maybe your simulators have different scale. A better way to check how auto layout elements lay on the screen is to use Preview in Interface Builder.
Open the main storyboard, and click on Assistant Editor. On the right hand side, select Preview (on the top left). And click the plus sign ( on the bottom left) to add different devices. You can see they are identical proportions on different screen sizes.
If you have any questions, please let me know.
Something maybe off topic
If I design the images/assets, I would like to use some vector base tool like Sketch to design the assets and export them to three different sizes. Please have a look my another project iOSAnimationSample. It has a Sketch file for the design.
Sketch design
Export assets to different sizes
In that case, iOS can pick up the proper assets for different devices.
The app you are referring to does not correctly support multiple screen sizes. The interface is scaled up to run on the 6 and 6 plus, which is why everything appears the same size.
Look at the screenshots from your app - the status bar is much smaller on the 6 plus. This is because it is supposed to take up less room on the screen. It's 20 points high on all devices.
Now look at the screenshot from the weather app - the status bars are the same size. Because the weather app does not support multiple screen sizes, iOS simply takes the smaller interface and scales it up to fill the screen.
If you want to achieve the same effect (which you shouldn't) then remove the LaunchScreen.xib file and use a launch image instead. But people don't buy larger phoned screens because they want to have the same content, but bigger. That would be achieved more cheaply by simply holding the phone closer to one's face.
You're supposed to take advantage of larger displays by allowing more content to be shown at once on the screen - more rows of data in a table, more text from a book, more images from a photo library.
In the case of a weather app the extra space should be used to display more rows of an hourly forecast or something, not just a larger version of a fairly useless icon depicting the type of weather.
I suspect it is only game support that means supporting larger screens properly is not already a requirement for app store submission. Supporting the 4 inch screen became mandatory quite quickly, you should expect a similar rule to be introduced for the 6 and 6 plus before too long.
If you want a specific element to always take up 50% of the width of the screen, or a label to always be the same size as an image, then you use autolayout constraints with multipliers. An autolayout constraint is of the basic structure:
attribute of A = (attribute of B * multiplier) + constant
Most of the time the multiplier is left as one, so you're just saying that this is 20 points to the left of that, or whatever, but you can use the multiplier as well, and say that A is the width of B, multiplied by 2 or 0.5 or whatever you like.
iOS uses points to calculate image and font sizes. On non-retina screen 1 point equals 1 pixel, on retina screens — 2 pixels, and for iPhone 6 Plus it is equal to 3 pixels (some downscaling is applied, though). If you want to scale the image and font based on the actual pixel size of the screen, you can get the number of pixel per point like this:
CGFloat screenScale = [[UIScreen mainScreen] scale];
The iPhone 5, 6 and 6 Plus screen aspect ratios are the same, while resolutions differ. If you want to simply keep proportions, then you have to pick a 'base' screen width or height (say, the iPhone 5 screen width, which is 320.0 points) and then calculate the proportion by dividing the actual device screen width (say, iPhone 6 Plus screen width, which is 414.0 points) by that 'base' width (414.0 / 320.0 = 1.29375). You can get the screen size like this:
CGRect screenBounds = [[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds];
Dividing screenBounds's width by base width gives you the proportion. Then you just multiply all the sizes and margins with that proportion (1.29375 in our case for iPhone 6 Plus). Hope you get the idea.
P.S. A good guide to resolutions is here.
P.P.S. And in your case, as skorolkov mentioned below, the app just upscales everything for bigger screens (add/remove splash screens to enable/disable this upscaling).
UPD: Ok, now I see what confuses you. Here's the thing: when Apple initially released iPhone 6 and 6 Plus many apps didn't support their larger screens and bigger resolutions. So they decided that if an app lacks splash screens specifically made for those phones, it should use the iPhone 5 resolution.
That's why you get the exact same pictures after manually resizing screenshots: the system does that too. It simply takes iPhone 5 'picture' and stretches it so that it fits larger screens. The drawback is clear (and visible, especially on iPhone 6 Plus): the fonts and images are blurry and upscaled (system interface elements, like status bar, get upscaled too). So basically you get the iPhone 5 picture on all larger-screened devices (you can check that by taking a screenshot on an iPhone 5, resizing it manually to fit iPhone 6/6 Plus resolution and comparing the actual iPhone 6/6 Plus screenshot to it).
To be clear: that's the behavior you currently get, but it's not good. To keep everything properly scaled using the devices' native resolution, use the method I described above (manual multiplication) or autolayouts with equal height/width set to desired ratios for interface elements.
Weather App is using upscale mode to run on iPhone 6+. You can enable it by removing launch screens for 6/6+.
Go to asset catalog, select your launch image and unset 'iOS 8 or Later' checkbox in Attributes Inspector.
Screenshot - your app has this set
Screenshot from WeatherApp
in programatically (X and Y) we pre define the values in constant :
#define XScale [[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds].size.width / 320.0f
#define YScale [[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds].size.height / 568.0f
Then create UIImageView programatically
var imageView : UIImageView
imageView = UIImageView(frame:CGRectMake(XScale *someValue, YScale * someValue, XScale *someValue, YScale *someValue));
imageView.image = UIImage(named:"image.jpg")
self.view.addSubview(imageView)
based on your screen size we need to set Constant values. We use for iPhone5 and 4s screen.
You need to set Layout constraint to all the views to make them look at same places and sizes in all screens sizes provided that the aspect ratio of screens are same.
Have you tried to remove autoResizingfunctionality from view?
Click on inner arrow to remove autoResize view as per superview
First turn off auto layout, auto resizing and size classes in storyboard.
Click on Images.xcassets icon and select all your graphics. In attribute inspector set Devices property to "Device Specific" and set the checkbox checked against "iPhone" and "Retina 4-inch"
Place all your graphics in 2x image set. You may place a higher resolution image set for better results with iPhone 6/6+.
Design your view for a reference device say iPhone 5 (320x568 portrait).
In your viewDidLoad method paste the following code
self.view.transform=CGAffineTransformScale(CGAffineTransformIdentity,self.view.frame.size.width/320, self.view.frame.size.height/568);
And you will have same result on iPhone 5/5s, iPhone 6/6+.
EDIT: Dont misunderstand. I get that I can put in myImage.png whose size is 568 x 320 and myImage#2x.png whose size is 1136 X 640 and, at run time, iOS will show the lager image if the device has a retina screen. That is not what this is about. Im talking strictly about placing a 1136 x 640 image in the storyboard.
Some details:
Using xcode 5
iPhone only app (iPhone 4 and above ideally)
Targeting iOS 7 (should keep out any iPhone 3gs ...right?)
Single view app
Using storyboards
My understanding is that I can provide only the higher resolution 1136 x 640 images my app needs for the iPhone 5 then use autolayout to constrain things in such a way that my UI works properly even if the device is an iPhone 4 and has less screen real estate.
My issue is that if I drag a 1136 x 640 image onto the storyboard the image is 2X the size of the view im dropping it into. I get that I can resize the UIImageView and set the mode to aspect fit and the image will display correctly in the view.
However, that would get quite annoying. Is there a way to just set the storyboard to use the retina images directly?
Now I can create images that are half the size (568 x 320) and those will drag and drop into the views perfectly. But I cant imagine why anyone would want to do that. This doesnt make sense to me. I would expect the SDK to let me layout the app in the highest resolution possible.
I tried using images named myImage.png and using myImage#2x.png but neither changed anything.
Don't think of the dimensions in Xcode as pixels, but points. So while you set the image dimensions to be 568 x 320, the #2x images are going to use two pixels per point.
What are you testing on? You might not be seeing a difference because you are only testing on retina devices. If you are only planning on supporting iOS 7 (iPhone 4 and up), you won't be using any non-retina devices.
I am using the Corona SDK to create a game in which I want a non-dynamic world size across all of the devices (i.e. 1440 x 960). However, the auto-scaling in Corona is not allowing me to do this consistently. For example, on the iPhone the screen moves two screens (480 * 2) pixels to the right (landscape mode), which is effectively 1440 px. However when switching to the iPad the scrolling is still moving two screen sizes to the right because it's viewing the iPad as 480 and not 1024 (the config file is set to 480 height and 320 width). Is there anyway to do this without turning off the content scaling? If I have to turn off content scaling, does that negate the advantages of the Corona SDK and the ability to code without thinking about the device?
thanks,
The point of Corona content scaling is exactly to not code multiple values on the logic...
So you have to either ignore the device size (if your world is "2 screen wide" it will be "2 screen wide" in ANY device) or turn off the scaling and handle the screen size manually...
I would not use the second option unless you want to torture users of smaller phones, that will see only a very small area of your playfield.