What resolution should my Android splash screens be?
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: 320x480, 480x854 (Droid), and 480x800 (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
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.
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