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I'm wanting to target WVGA (480x800) and FWVGA (480x854) devices with my program. My question is: for my full screen background bitmaps which resolution should I make them?

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4 Answers 4

There are a few ways you can attack this issue.

Make one background per aspect ratio and calculate which to use when the app starts. Find the aspect ratio by dividing the width by the height.

Make one background with filler on the sides and bottom for cropping, when you display the image resize it's dimension which has the largest difference from that of the screen's resolution to the exact screen resolution. This will cause the bottom or sides to get cropped a bit.

You could also use a combination of these strategies to create a couple backgrounds, one each for a range of aspect ratios, and then use the cropping strategy to take up the negligible difference.

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Be flexible. Android can be run on many different devices, and it would be a very bad idea to limit yourself to certain resolutions. Instead, write your code so that it scales. (Keep it mind that you might have to crop the image if necessary, or live with different aspect ratios).

Just as food for thought... there are Android devices with 480x320, 240x320, 480x800, 480x854, not the mention the upcoming Samsung tablet at a higher resolution. Limiting yourself to a certain resolution would be bad.

Here is something from the SDK you may want to read up on too: http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html

EDIT: Assuming that you're focusing on those two resolutions -- I would say it depends on your image. Your best bet may be to go for 480x854 and design the image in such a way that it won't look bad if you lose 27 bytes on either side. If that's impossible, make it 480x800 and add black bars on either side if run on 480x854.

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you can get any bitmap and convert it into a drawable using BitmapDrawable .Then you can set bounds to the drawable to match your screen background.

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I've made my background graphics 480x864, the hdpi equivalent of WQVGA and thus as large as it gets. Since I center background graphics vertically, this will display nicely on QVGA, HVGA, WQVGA and WVGA, cropping a bit in most cases. To make sure that the important elements are always seen, I limit them to an area of 480x640 in the center.

To leave nothing to chance, I provide scaled down versions of the graphics at the same aspect ratio for MDPI and LDPI. Works great so far.

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