Get your Assets ready for iOS8 and iPhone 6 Plus
It’s that time of the year again. Apple released a new device and now you have to recreate your assets so your app supports iOS8 and iPhone 6/6+. If your designs are in Photoshop chances are you are cursing at the changes at the moment. In this brief post I will cover the basic device sizes, @3x downsizing as well as something new and interesting – Xcode PDF Assets!
First things first – Sizes
The first iPhone had a very small resolution (320×480). Back then points were equal to pixels and everything was simple and easy to understand. I am saying that because if you look at the first device you will see the logic behind all future sizes. With the announcement of the Retina display all sizes doubled – the birth of @2x assets.
@2x is a naming convention – the normal images ware named “filename.png” and the retina ware named “filename@2x.png” . Then came xcode image assets.
Farewell pixel perfect…
Yes, it seems the iPhone 6 Plus assets are bigger than its screen resolution and they are being down-sampled. There has been a lot of designers saying pixel perfect doesn’t matter anymore since you cannot actually see pixels on retina devices but still. A line is seen different when aligned with pixels and when not aligned.
Turning ON iPhone 6/6+ Support
Don’t Panic! At the moment your app supports the new iPhones by scaling itself. This means the iOS8 update is not so urgent after all. Nevertheless after a little while the scaled apps are going to look strange next to the proper “native support” iPhone 6 apps.
To turn OFF the scale all you need to do is to add proper Launch images for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6+. (iPhone 6 portrait – 750×1334 iPhone 6+ Portrait and Landscape – 1242×2208)
Pro tip – use symbols or smart objects to easily create and update your launch images. Here’s mine in illustrator:
I use a multi-export script to export named art-boards.
Xcode PDF Assets
Learn more about those and how to generate them in the extended version of this post on my site. http://codemotionapps.com/get-assets-ready-ios8-iphone-6-plus/
