Develop Reference

Android notification - which image assets for developers

By material design guidelines, this is what a notification looks like on Android M and Android N:
Now, what are the image assets needed for the developer to implement it this way? I haven't found any specific size requirements either, but based on screenshots, the large icon/avatar is 40px in 1.0x mdpi resolution.
Let's say this is the layout of the notification for Android M:
What I thought was needed was the icon as seen in (1) which then gets masked to a circle by code and then the small icon is added using a different image. But I have been told that it's not possible and an image similar to (3) is needed. But that doesn't sound right since it wouldn't be aligned properly with the notifications that don't include the small app icon and since it looks different in Android N, it wouldn't work either.
So the question is, which images (and what size are these) does a developer need to make it look like the image from the design guidelines? I assume that a different image (the small icon) for M and N is needed as well?
Thank you.
/e just to clarify, I am asking as a designer, not a developer, otherwise I would try it myself

how do i display my page depending on the users screen size

is there any method maybe using php (excluding js/jquery as i don't know how to use it) to get the users screensize and use it to make the css work with that
for example if i use percentages instead of pixels to set up my heights and widths it still doesn't respond to the screen size of my phone and the user has to zoom in to see the information clearly, it doesn't make it bigger, and by that i don't only mean text, images and html elements such as divs/spans/w.e....
also i don't want to use bootstrap, i want to understand how it works, using bootstrap is like driving an automatic car without knowing how to drive a manual...

One essential thing in web design for smaller devices is to include this in the header of all pages:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"; initial-scale="1.0" />
It deactivates the automatic "shrinking"/downzooming of the page content to the current viewport (= screen) size, which is important for smartphones and tablets. A pixel remains a pixel, so if your smartphone screen is only 320px wide, that's what's the width limit in absolute pixels.
If this isn't included, the built-in automatic just interprets the width of a non-responsive page as 100% and compresses it to the width of the device, which will result in tiny fonts and images, which you can see in every non-repsonsive website.
After that, you'll have to become friends with media queries...

There are some frameworks tha will help you get this kind of behavior. One of the easiest ones to use is Twitter Bootstrap. It is very easy to setup and understand. It uses a grid to determine the size of the elements in your page relative to the width of the device. Also, there are many prebuilt items that might help you getting started.
Another useful framework is foundation, the concept is very similar to twitter bootstrap. Altough it is more flexible it requires a bit more time to lear how to use it.
If you are going to do the adaptative functionality by yourself, or if you are interested in learning how this is actually done you should investigate media querys.

Stumped on the dimensions of the logo to be placed on the various DPI screen versions while designing Android App

I am trying to design an android app and feel stumped on the dimensions of the logo to be placed on the various DPI screen versions and other scenarios possible. Please suggest what should be the size of logo per DPI screen. I am using attached image as reference for other design specifications such as icons and bar size.
I am trying to create a launcher icon
Developer has requested different logo size versions as per the
screen DPI.
What should be the size of the correct size of the logo max and min
to be placed on any screen of the app? Is it completely up to the designer?
Thanks in advance.
There are commonly two ways to target all screen DPIs.
Easiest way - Make all images to Extra High or Extra Extra High DPI.
Safe way - Make all images for every single DPI.
Now my question is what size should my logo be in order to be able to make Make all images for every single DPI.
Hope this help to understand.

If you are trying to create a launcher icon then the sizes in pixels are clearly defined in the image you have posted.
To get started you should try loading the logo into the Android Asset Studio at:
http://romannurik.github.io/AndroidAssetStudio/icons-launcher.html
This may give you good enough results to use. Otherwise, you can at least see what icon sizes are required and what folder layout is required by Android.

Did a bit more research and asked around and finally found the solutions.
While every tutorial out the there specifies the ratio to resize the images to as per DPI, But how to actually do it was proving to be quite difficult for a novice me.
Then used PNG Express and rest was all easy. They provided every image as per the developer specified ratio. While this tool is not free and requires first hand payment, please update if there's any better tool.
I am sorry if I wasn't very clear in my question.

Unity Android NGUI Components shows smaller on the build version than the Emulator version

So i was building this UI for an app in Unity to be deployed on Android Platform.
Here is the preview from the Game Window :
But when i build and run the app on my device, it shows this :
The header log is anchored on Top, the title is anchored on Center and the buttons are anchored on Bottom.
Here is the hierarchy of the components :
Im new to Unity and NGUI so i really dont know what's wrong with this. Thank you guys.

Different behavior is probably caused by different resolution/ration on your device in compare to your editor window. To emulate such behavior in the unity editor, you can force resolution/ration in your game window, or you can add your specific device resolution (what I actually recommend for you to do as a good start):
When you experiment with few of them, you will see that your interface is behaving in different ways.
To change that behavior on different screens, you can check your UIRoot options, especially Scaling, see UIRoot documentation.
Another good places to start is NGUI forum's topic concerned in handling different resolutions or official video about NGUI anchors.
Hope that this will guide you to perfect cross-device interface design.

I think your problem is configuring how is going to work NGUI with your sprites. There are 2 things you could do:
Use a pixel perfect resolution: This will maintain the perfect size of the sprite, and will look the same on every platform (this causes some things to look smaller if the resolution is higher)
Use a fixed Size of the UI and recalculate the sized based on the device.
The problem you are having here.. is because of that. The background for example, should be larger if the screen is larger.
To achieve that.. NGUI provides you with a UIRoot where you can configure the Scaling style to PixelPerfect, FixedSize and FixedSizeOnMobiles.
Try setting that up and the images will adapt to the different sizes.
Hope this works for you, I'll attach an image so you can check out what I'm talking about

Image Size Best Practices for Mobile Application

I am building a mobile application that will target iPhone/iPad and Android phones. The application will involve users taking photos and uploading to my server and later on the users will be able to look at those photos on their mobile devices (although not necessarily their own photos so an Android user might be looking at a photo taken with an iPhone).
Which sizes should I save the photos to be able to cover the most use cases? iPads are 1.333 W/H, most mobile phones are 1.5 or 1.333 W/H with some rare 1.666 W/H. Specifically:
iPad: 1024x768, iPad3: 2048x1536, iPhone and some other phones: 960x640, 480x320, 800x480.
To be able to keep it manageable, I need to decide on a few certain image sizes and save the photos in those sizes. I am not really looking for help on the technical side. I can do image scaling on the server side etc. I am looking for recommendations / best practices / lessons learned about image sizes before I go too far into building it.
Which sizes should I save the photos in to cover the most use cases?
Do you recommend any client side scaling before uploading to server to save on transfer time (for example scaling down 2048x1536 iPad photos) or should I always transfer originals?
How should I handle incompatible image sizes (showing a picture taken with an iPad on an Android device for example)? Should I pre-cut those images on my server before sending to client or should I let the client phone handle image resizing?
There is also the issue of UI. There will be other things on the page other than the photo maybe a button or two for navigation. Should I go for something smaller than the full screen size while keeping the same aspect ratio when saving pictures?
I know some of these questions don't have one answer and the answers are relative but I wanted to get some opinions. Thanks.

For Android, I think the best place for you to start would be here, it has a lot of information including standard screen sizes and how to display images while keeping them in the best possible quality.
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
I'd also suggest doing as much image manipulation as possible on your server. Images are a pain to work with on Android due to memory constraints and fragmentation. Two phones may store pictures taken the same way with different orientations, and there is no simple way to handle rotations, though it can be done (thankfully, I've yet to encounter a phone that incorrectly records Exif data, but I wouldn't be surprised if they existed...). The more you rely on the phone to do, the more chances you have for error due to manufacturers putting wrappers around and otherwise customizing how it handles media.
As for how to display, ideally if your back end is already doing a bunch of different resizes, you can include your screen density when you request the images and send the best size based on the dev guide. If you want to keep differences to a minimum, at least support med or high density for phones, and extra high density for tablets.
Just my two cents, I'm sure you'll have a lot of opinions. Good luck.

I don't have a full answer for you, but I do have some thoughts...
1) I'd suggest reducing the image sizes before uploading. If I were using your application and I had to upload a 4 meg photo, everytime I wanted to use your application, I'd probably pass. And as we venture forward, we're hitting much better technology in terms of camera phones; Nokia has released a 41 megapixel camera, which I'm guessing will create rather large images. Users having to download a 4-6 MB image is also not a great idea. Just some thoughts from a user point of view.
2) I wouldn't cut the images. You don't necessarily know what parts of the image aren't important, so how would you know where to crop it? Let the phone size the pictures accordingly and rely on the ability to zoom into pictures to see things at a larger size.
3) You could try to make a UI that hides buttons. If you have something really simple (like just going forward or backwards) you could rely on gesture controls (swiping) to move around your application. You can implement sliding drawers and menus that take up space temporarily, when in use, but give you the space back when you want to look at the main content (pictures, in your case). I've typically found that hiding buttons doesn't work well and people seem to want/search for buttons that let them navigate, but the Android gallery works just fine with menu + swiping only, so who really knows.