peterj
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06/10/14 05:25 AM (10 years ago)

Tip: cropping iPhone screen shots on your mac

I'm sure most of you know how to take a screen capture of your phone in the emulator, or on the phone itself. You also know that you have to crop those screen shots before submitting to Apple, so they don't have the title bar. I used to use Photoshop to do the cropping, because of the strict dimension requirements. However, I just noticed that in the most recent version of the Preview app in Mavericks, you can easily crop to a specific dimension. Simply open your screen capture, hit Command-A (or Select All), and when you drag the selection handles around, you'll see the exact pixel dimensions of your selection box next to your mouse arrow. Then hit Command-K (or Crop). I found this much quicker, and I don't think this feature existed in previous versions of Preview.
 
mysps
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06/10/14 06:13 AM (10 years ago)
Yeah it existed a long while I've used it since leopard :) but thanks for the post! I'm sure others will find it useful.
 
Angry Ninja
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06/10/14 09:16 AM (10 years ago)
Hi Peter, Do you crop the title bar out of your images just for better appearance? I only ask because I have 16 apps in the app store, and never once cropped out a title bar or nav bar, and never had apple reject the screenshots. Just curious. :)
 
peterj
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06/10/14 11:09 AM (10 years ago)
At this link https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/LanguagesUtilities/Conceptual/iTunesConnect_Guide/Appendices/Properties.html about halfway down, it talks about screen shots. There's a bullet that says "don't include the device status bar in your screen shots", and it also lists image dimensions, and the dimensions are the iPhone screen minus about 80 pixels in the y direction, which implies cropping out the status bar. So perhaps maybe it's not something they would reject your app for, but more of a look and feel or best practice thing. It's a small detail, but I agree with it, because I find myself noticing the status bar in people's screen shots ("hmm this developer is using Verizon...and they took the screenshot at 8:58pm...") :)
 
Angry Ninja
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06/10/14 11:14 AM (10 years ago)
Ah, I never seen that before. I either got lucky or they didn't enforce it. ;). I'll have to remember to crop them from now on.
 
Niraj
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06/10/14 04:44 PM (10 years ago)
 

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