I’ve not really done much with the Android app in the last week and a bit, due to getting back into the routine of University, and quite a bit of work due to having three deadlines in the next week. So I’ve given myself a few hours off work to do some work on the app. Unfortunately for me, most of the work to do is making different sizes of buttons and logos, due to different screen size support. Android handles different screen sizes in a better than I expected way, having 4 different categories for pixel density xh, h, m, l (extra-high (~2320dpi), high(~240dpi), medium(~160dpi), and low (~120dpi)). The annoying thing with this is, I have to have at least 4 different sizes of each drawable asset.

As you can see on the screenshot above, in the main menu, I have 6 drawable assets at the moment, and so this increases my work-load to 24 drawable assets. Booting up 3 different android emulators with alternate dpi was just a bit of fun, but you can really see how different all the screen sizes are, and if I fire it up on my galaxy nexus, because I haven’t made any different sizes of buttons, it looks a bit ridiculous. Most of the work is just re-sizing what I already have, but it’s a bit of a pain, and one of the jobs that saps time where you didn’t expect it to.

It also seems that Windows Phone 8 will be getting different screen resolution and size support, too. I’ll be very interested to see how Microsoft handles that, and if they do it in the same fashion as android, or do something completely different!