Learning iPhone Programming

Chapter 9. Distributing Your Application

At this point, you have several applications that are almost ready to distribute, and perhaps you have ideas for your own applications and you want to start writing your first application and publish it to the App Store. However, before you can do that, you have to do some more housekeeping.

Adding Missing Features

Two things have been missing from your iPhone applications, the first being the lack of a custom icon. This is crucial for the marketing of your application; you need to bring your application design together to present it to users. When a user scrolls through a long list of possible applications on the App Store, applications with strong icon design stand out. But remember that the user has to look at your application’s icon every time he looks at the iPhone’s home screen. The icon has to be distinctive to stand out, but it also has to be attractive so that the user is willing to keep your application around. I’ve uninstalled otherwise good applications because I couldn’t put up with their icons, and I’m not alone.

Adding an Icon

The standard iPhone home screen icon used for your application is 57×57 pixels square in PNG format with no transparency or layers (Icon.png). You also must provide Apple with a 512×512-pixel version of your application icon for display on the App Store (iTunesArtwork with no extension; you will need to provide this when you upload your app). This larger image must be in TIFF or JPEG format, and again have ...