For a tvOS app I am trying to set up the App Icon. First xCode complained about the size and now about the image's alpha.
/var/folders/fc/s3m4kgtn2gs977m4k8x2s2xm0000gn/T/Large-AppIcon-Scratch-4AC4A1D7-D8F5-4D58-8667-A11E4F2DE7DA.xcassets:
The last image stack layer with content, "Back", must be a fully
opaque bitmap. The pixel at position (0, 0) has an alpha value of 212.
Are there any easy instructions, tools, or templates which can be used to create a proper App Icon & Top Shelf Image.brandassets ?
(without Photoshop CC!)
Bohemian Coding's Sketch is a great tool to use. If you don't want to spend $100, you can simply use a program like Paint.
For the small icon, each layer should be 659x371.
For the large icon, each layer should be 1977x1113. (3x the size of the small icon).
The bottom layer cannot have any transparency, but the top two need to have transparency.
Also be sure to leave plenty of buffer room around the outside of your icon.
I was dealing with this issue for a while. Finally it dawned on my that Layer 0 can have transparency but Layer 1 cant. With that said, I thought Layer 0 would of been the background and Layer 1 in the foreground, but its the opposite. Layer 0 is the closest to you, if that makes sense.
Instructions can be found in the Apple TV Human Interface Guidelines. There is also a link to download resource templates including templates for both app icons and the topshelf image.
If you provide an opaque back layer for the app icons then your problem should disappear.
You can use any tool of choice, preferably one that is able to import .psd files (the templates are in .psd format). Personally I use Pixelmator. AFAIK GIMP also supports importing .psd files.
Related
I am working on a Xamarin App compatible with all devices. I have a general question related to images. I am using Location Mark Image Icons to provide locations available on the Map. My issue is, Image has a white background which is also showing along with its background. I want to show only the Image.
Is this related to the designer to provide the image without background? Or as a developer, I can do something on it.
Xamarin.Forms doesn't delete your white background. What you need to do is following a small tutorial on how to use Adobe Photoshop for example and export your images as png, you might even consider which png type you need, there's 3 types of png:
png8
png24
png32
I won't be going deep in explaining each one of them, but you need to know that they all support transparency and could have a transparent background, however, you might notice some differences between them on the edges.
For example, png8 will give a small white border while png24 will not show that.
You can check this for example: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop-elements/using/optimizing-images-png-24-format.html
No, you can't do anything about it using Xamarin.Forms. You need to modify the image and remove the background (using Adobe Photoshop, etc.) and make sure to save it as .png.
If its simple white background you want to remove, You can utilise simple [MakeTransparent][1] method ofBitMap.
But this will remove all white coloured pixel. So IF your logo also contains white color, better you contact your designer.
When I make a new Universal App in Visual Studio 2013 I get a number of graphics files for the logos, splash screens, etc. in the Assets folder, for example Square71x71Logo.scale-240.png. The Package.appxmanifest then maps these files to the various required things. For example Square71x71Logo.scale-240.png is mapped in Package.appxmanifest to Square 71x71 Logo.
The actual file is 170 pixels wide, 170 pixels high, Photoshop reads it as having 72 pixels per inch, and it has an 8 bit colour depth.
What does the .scale-240 part of the file name signify?
I'm replacing the file and I am not sure how to scale-240-ify the new image.
The scale-240 part of the file name is a resource qualifier that indicates that the file is used for 240% DPI systems.
Resource qualifiers allow the app to provide different versions of the same resource for different scenarios and refer them all internally by the base name:
Scaling for different DPI systems: .scale-100, .scale-140, .scale-180, .scale-240
Language (if the image has text in it): .lang-de-DE, .lang-en-us
Contrast (to simplify for high contrast modes): .contrast-high, .contrast-standard
Layout direction (if the image should be different in LTR vs RTL language settings): .layoutdir-RTL, .layoutdir-LTR
DirectX feature level: .DXFL-DX9, .DXFL-DX11
The app can reference the image by its base name (e.g. logo.png) and the version which best matches the current scale, contrast level, language, etc. will be automatically used.
The default phone template provides scale-240 images since high-DPI phones are fairly common and it is generally better to scale down from a larger image than to scale up a small image. Best would be for you to provide multiple resolutions when you replace the stock ones with your own, especially if your images are complicated and don't scale well by default.
See How to name resources using qualifiers (XAML)
Universal apps need to be able to run on very different screens. You cannot predict up front what kind of device the user might have. Big difference if he has a cheap contract phone, an expensive slate or a desktop machine. WinRT helps by automatically scaling your app to match the screen resolution.
Supported scaling percentages for a desktop/slate app are 80, 100, 140 or 180%. For a phone it is 100, 140 or 240%.
Text can auto-scale easily but images do not. They get blurry when they get rescaled, a single pixel in the image no longer coincides with a single screen pixel. Pretty noticeable when the image contains fine line art or text. Scaling down necessarily loses pixels, details may disappear.
So the Visual Assets tab of the manifest editor allows you to select multiple images, each suitable for a specific scaling percentage. You found the -240 version in your phone project's Assets directory, the 240% scaling version that were auto-generated when you created the project. The desktop version has -100 assets by default, 100% scaling.
You may want to add your own. You don't have to.
.scale-xxx appears to refer to pre-scaled image resources.
If you are using a an image logo.png with size 100x100px then logo.scale-240.png should be an image of size 240x240px, i.e. scaled by a factor of 240 percent. The idea behind this concept is apparently to avoid potentially expensive and inaccurate rescaling by the displaying device, by supplying several prescaled images at defined scales.
In your case: 170px / 2.40 = ~71px
See also the corresponding MSDN article. (The linked article is in German, I will leave it to the interested reader to find the matching English one ;-)
I need to develop a desktop application which will
1.) have a list of the Different Application logos (Background Transparent) e.g. IE, FIREFOX, CHROME, PHOTOSHOP ETC.
2.) User will take a screenshot of desktop and save the image.
3.) Now my application need to search all the logos in the screenshot image and tell which all logos are present and where.
4.) I used OPENCV, it's working, but when user changes the desktop background & captures screenshot, it's not working as the transparent area of logo is getting the desktop background content.
Can somebody provide a solution or libraries open source, commercial to do this job.
This is easy to do using cross-correlation.
See my answer to this question.
Basically:
Start with desktop image and one template image for each icon
Apply edge detection (e.g. Sobel) to the desktop image and template images.
Throw away the original desktop image and templates, you won't need them anymore cause we'll be using the edge-detected images
For each template
Do template matching as you normally would
Threshold the maximum of the result. If it's above the threshold, you have a match at that position. Otherwise, no match.
If your icons are aligned in a grid on the desktop, you may be able to speed up your processing by only checking those specific grid positions.
EDIT
You can also save a lot of time by knowing which icons to search for. If you have access to the file system, then just look for *.lnk files (or any other extensions you may be interested in) in the directory that corresponds to the desktop (can't remember exactly what it is, but for Windows7 it's something like c:\users\misha\desktop). That will tell you what icons are there on the desktop. This will allow you to shorten your template candidate list before you go and do the template matching.
I like misha's answer and I think it should work for you. But it that doesn't work you could try replacing the transparant pixels in your reference logo with uniformly distributed random noise before trying the match. This will make the transparant pixels irrelevant for any matching computation because they will match just as bad no matter what there is on the desktop in those pixels.
I'm not familiar with the tools you're using, but I'm guessing you have to either:
a) Tell your program to ignore transparent pixels in the icon images during the comparison operation.
OR
b) Tell your program to treat transparent pixels in the icon images as "wildcards" which can be any color.
I would like to write a program that can mirror a portion of the main display into a new window. Ideally this new window could then be displayed on an external monitor. I have seen this uiltity for a flightsim that does this on a pc (a multifunction display extractor).
CLick here for a screenshot of the program (MFD Extractor)
This would be a live window ie. constantaly updated video display not just a static graphic.
I have looked at screen magnifiers or vnc clients for ideas but I think I need to write something from scratch. I have tried to do some reading on osx programing but where do I start in terms of gaining access to the display? I somehow need to extract the graphics from a particular program. Is it best to go near the final output stage (the individual pixels sent to the display) or somewhere nearer the window management stage.
Any ideas or pointers would be much appreciated. I just need somewhere to start from.
Regards,
There are a few ways to do this:
Quartz Display Services will let you get access to the video memory for a screen.
Quartz Window Services (a.k.a. CGWindow) will let you create an image of everything that lies below a window. If you create a borderless, transparent, empty, high-level window whose frame occupies an entire screen, everything below it will be everything on that screen. (Of course, you could create a smaller window in order to copy a section of the screen.)
There's also a way to do it using OpenGL that I never fully understood. That technique is demonstrated by a couple of code samples, OpenGLScreenSnapshot and OpenGLCaptureToMovie. It's more or less obsoleted by CGWindow, though.
Each of those will get you an image that you can then show or write to a file or something.
To show an image, use NSImageView or IKImageView. If you want to magnify it, IKImageView has a zoomFactor property, but if you want nearest-neighbor scaling (like Pixie, DigitalColor Meter, or xScope), I think you'll need to write a custom view for that (but even that isn't all that hard).
In a win32 application, I want to have a button with an icon which looks gray when the button is disabled and 'brighter' when the mouse hovers.
I know I can create three bitmaps with an icon editor, but since the icon can be user selected and loaded from the disk, I would like to create the other two versions programmatically.
So, starting with a handle to an image, I would like to:
- Create a new image with all colors converted to grey.
- Create a new image with all colors shifted to white or yellow.
Can this be done using win32 api calls?
Examples in any language will be appreciated.
Maybe the good old DrawState function will suffice. (For some reason it is now listed as only available from Win2000 which is not true.)
And maybe not, in which case you might want to use SetColorAdjustment function.
If the icon is user-selected do you control the format? If not you'll probably want to incorporate an image library or external process like DevIL or Imagemagick which handle more formats than Microsofts API's are likely to..