Drawable folders for high resolution handhelds

Question

I can't figure out how to produce drawables for the new "high-res" handhelds like the Galaxy Nexus, One X, Galaxy S3 etc that have a resolution of 1280x720 or higher.

I always try to make as few layout-versions as possible. Preferably just one but at times a layout-long and notlong is necessary. And make the xml smart enough to handle all devices. But that's only possible if the drawable resources are there to supply all the different resolutions and sizes.

All has been nice and smooth until the new big phones arrived and I find that the drawables are to small for them. No xxhdpi-folder yet from Google so I must be doing something wrong.

I know it's forbidden to mention pixels here but still you have to use photoshop or some other pixel based application to make the drawables. Therefore you need to know how big to make these drawables.

This is what i've done so far:

xhdpi: 640x960

hdpi: 480x640

mdpi: 320x480

ldpi: 240x320

The problem is that when a 1280x720 device gets the drawables from the xhdpi folder things starts looking bad, the images are too small and there's too much space between them.

What do you base your drawable source files on? xhdpi in 1028x720? That messes up the lower res versions for me.

I have an ad agency breathing down my neck wondering why it doesn't look as perfect as on the iPhone...

Answer 1

I have a Galaxy Nexus, and I use the xhdpi resource folder (at a 2.0 scaling factor) and the images look great. Do you have an example (screenshot preferably) of what issue you're having? If you're hardcoding spacing and sizes in pixels, then yeah, it'll probably look weird at higher densities. Are you trying to hardcode a background image 1:1 at a specific pixel size? If so, that's never a good idea on Android.

Answer 2

Well, as I said above I can't find any handhelds with Android on it that's got a resolution of 640x960. So I based all my images on 720x1280 instead and put the 640x960 resolution stuff in a large-hdpi folder.

Now my app looks great on the latest Nexus, the Galaxy S3, HTC One-X and all of the other newer hires models. I think the tablets when looking for resources will go for large first, then hdpi where they will find the 2x scaled images.

This is what I ended up with:

xhdpi: 720x1280

large-hdpi: 640x960

hdpi: 480x640

mdpi: 320x480

ldpi: 240x320