Question

I’m creating a splash screen that will display while my Android application loads. I’d like to create it at the correct size so Android won’t auto-scale it up or down to fit the screen. (It’s a bitmap image, a photograph of an oil painting, so I can’t just turn it into a nine-patch.)

But there are at least three important screen sizes I care about: 320×480, 480×854 (Droid), and 480×800 (Nexus One).

I’ve read the documentation on supporting multiple screen sizes, but I still don’t see how I’m supposed to configure different splash screens for Droid/Nexus one (they’re both “hdpi” resources as far as Android is concerned), and I don’t know exactly how large my splash screen should be in any case. (How tall is the OS title bar/menu in Droid? N1?)

What size should I make these images, and how do I tell Android to use the correct size on a given screen?

Answer 1

You don’t need to worry about the absolute screen size or status bars or anything — that’s why we have nine-patch images.

What I did was have an image that looked good for each resolution — essentially a logo on a transparent background, with some text at the bottom.

Then I chopped off quite a lot of space at the top and side edges, made a nine-patch border round the image, with a single pixel near the left, right and top edges. This allows the image to expand evenly at the sides and top to fill the screen.

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Edit, in response to Dan’s comment below:

Yes, there is a way to determine which graphics should be used for which explicit screen sizes, but it’s deprecated.

Just as there are drawable-hdpi and -ldpi resource qualifiers, it’s also possible to use drawable-HHHxWWW — the larger pixel dimension coming first.

e.g. drawable-800x480 and drawable-854x480