Retina Display
With the release of the iPhone and Apple recent policy on not accepting iOS2.x apps into the app store anymore, I decided it was time to rebuild the entire product line with SDK4.0 and target 3.0 and above devices.
Part of that process is including a new 114×114 icon in the bundle that the retina display uses to give a sharper icon on the springboard. If it’s not provided, the old 57×57 icon is used. It will look just like it did on previous hardware, because the iPhone 4 doubles the pixels since the resolution is exactly 2x the size in both directions.
After reading through the Apple forums, it appeared there were several different approaches to getting this to work. This is the approach I found worked for me.
First I went back to my original 512×512 icon and scaled in down to 114×114 (don’t scale up your 57×57). I then named this icon114.png and dropped it in the same location as my icon.png. Then I edited my info.plist and added CFBundleIconFiles as follows:
I only had the simulator to test with, so I couldn’t visually tell any difference. So I then put a red X through my icon and verified that that’s the one that came up in the simulator. Still… I wasn’t 100% sure how it was going to look on the iPhone 4, but I released anyway.
Yesterday I put out a call on Facebook and Twitter for help from anyone with an iPhone 4, because the update to Jiggle Balls Spikes was approved. A guy named Rod helped me out and sent me the springboard v1.4 and v1.5 screenshots which proved that the new icon is being used on the retina display. See for yourself.
Notice how smooth the Apple Mail icon is compared to all the other non-iOS4 apps. The spikey ball looks a little pixelated. Now lets see what happens when the update was applied.
Wallah! A big improvement. So that’s how you get the new icon in your bundle. I haven’t decided whether to update all my app with all new higher resolution assets. I’m leaning towards not, but focusing on doing that for future projects.
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You can test with the simulator. Set it to iPhone 4 then zoom from 50% to 100%
Thanks Richard, I’ll give it a try.