iPhone Icons
Since I’ve been dabbling in iPhone development for the last little while, I wanted to just write down a few items regarding the icon to hopefully help anyone else out there to avoid some of the incorrect information I ran across on the web.
The icons are 57×57 pixels, not 60×60.
The rounded corners and the reflective “button effect” are added automatically by the system, all you need to do is create a square flat image (57×57).
In development mode (and probably for ad-hoc distribution) you can get away with using a .jpg for your icon, but when you upload your app to Apple they will reject it if it isn’t a .png.
I had read about some of the complications of adding the icon to your app, but it is quite simple. First, add your icon to your project just like any other resource, then open Info.plist right in Xcode and type in the filename for your icon. I believe there are some other customized settings that you can configure in the .plist regarding the icon and maybe that is where the complications came in, but it wasn’t clear in what I’d read that adding the icon itself was simple.
Lastly, when submitting your app you are also required to submit a large icon (512×512). I have heard rumors that your app will be rejected if your large icon and small icon don’t match. If that is the case you’ll want to be sure to create an icon that looks good in both sizes. I believe this rumor because it makes sense, but I don’t know how exact the images have to be to be considered a match. I guess I’ll find out soon enough because in the app I submitted I created my small icon first and the large icon later. The larger one resembles the smaller, but they aren’t “exactly” the same. In the future I’ll just create the large one first and resize it to make the smaller one. I’ll update this post if I get any more information on that.
**UPDATE**
Turns out that the icons don’t have to be “exact”. My app was accepted even though the smaller icon was not created directly from the larger one. Visually they looked the same, so I assume that the person who got rejected because of the icons probably had visually different large and small icons.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.