Journal of a Maker

With the advent of the iPhone 4 Retina Display, iOS application developers have an even larger task when it comes to creating the various sizes of icons they need for their applications. In summary, here are the icon sizes and where they’re applied:

1. 57×57 – iPod touch, iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS main screen
2. 29×29 – iPod touch, iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS app settings and Spotlight, iPad settings
3. 72×72 – iPad main screen
4. 50×50 – iPad Spotlight
5. 72×72 – iPad main screen
6. 114×114 – iPhone 4 main screen
7. 58×58 – iPhone 4 settings and Spotlight
8. 320×320 – iOS documents
9. 64×64 – iOS documents

You may wish to customize your document icons (e.g., by overlaying your icon on a page icon or somesuch). And of course, iTunes requires that you submit a 512×512 image to be used in the App Store and elsewhere. This is often customized but will likely be similar in style to your primary app icon.

If you’re like me, you don’t have a graphic designer operating at the pixel level to produce sharp, snazzy icons at all those sizes. So instead of tooling around in Photoshop every time you tweak your 512×512 master icon (Image -> Image Size… -> 57px -> Save As… -> Undo -> ad infinitum), why not automate the process?

I’ve put together a small (tiny) XCode project that uses AppKit to output all the icon sizes mentioned above. And it’ll be easy to tweak when the iPad with Retina Display (*fingers crossed*) debuts and needs 96px and 144 px versions of your icon. Throw it into your build system and get freshly-resized icons every time you compile. Grab it here:

Okay, so you’re spelunking around in Mac OS using Terminal. You try to ‘cd’ into a directory only to be told that what you’re trying to get to “is not a directory.” Then you remember that the target directory is actually a shortcut that you created with Finder. It looks just link a symlink in Finder, so shouldn’t it act like one in Terminal?

Unfortunately, in OS X, aliases are treated differently by the command line than symlinks. In particular, they won’t be followed by the “cd” command, leading to your present frustration. Fortunately, with a little elbow grease, you can patch up your shell and be on your merry way. Continue reading »