BlackBerry® World™ Development

[steve_web]

On February 22nd I myself and many other developers reached out to RIM to let them know that someone/some program had over compressed all of the AppWorld screenshots on the PlayBook resulting in horribly pixelated images.

On March 12th I received confirmation from Alec Saunders that this had been fixed but might take a little while to push its way through caches etc.

It's now March 15th and I still see no improvement at all... Even new releases suffer from the pixelation.

Here's a clip from one of my screenshots...my original... crisp lines, you can see the texture details, and the text is clean and sharp...

the one on the right is from AppWorld... lines are blurry, text is hard to read, crisp images are lost, and everything has a "rainbow" of pixels surrounding it where the jpeg pixelation is clearly visible.

  

This issue makes All apps look terrible and un-professional... I live within an hour of the Waterloo and Toronto offices... And would be more than willing to take time off work to come and help fix this if needed... Please indicate that someone is actively looking into this and provide an ETA for when we can expect AppWorld to be back up and running in reasonable order.

Please send me a PM if I can help accelerate this process in any way.

[lewellyn]

Here's what it does to one of mine. 

Original (as resized and submitted to App World):

This is what it turned out as (screenshot from time it was published; image still looks identical):

As you can see, it lost its portrait orientation and it's compressed so bad you can't even tell it's got text. It's utterly amazing that users aren't complaining more than I've heard about how terrible PlayBook apps look. 

I can tell you that this hasn't made me want to put out any paid apps. There's no way we can give ourselves a reasonably good first impression like this, and that first impression is a lot of what users go by...

[RottenOgre]

Yeah, it's pretty bad... Screenshots give the user their first impression of the app and if they are as grainy and ugly as they are currently are, I imagine lots of users are just hitting the back button instead of downloading an app.

[peter9477]

Here's a good example of the portrait mode screwup, as well as the hideous compression artifacts:

My original, resized to match what you should see in the App World client:

The way it appears now (snipped out of a screenshot and size unchanged):

[Snuupy]

Same here:

Original:

App World:

The quality seems much worse on the app world screenshots, like the previous posters have said. 

[Offthahorse]

i know you "shouldnt have to" but these seem more like resizing issues than anything.

try to make your screenshots perfect squares, even if the extra parts of the squares are transparent (png)

this way they wont get stretched

https://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/servedimages/570502.png/?t=10

[lewellyn]

While that would presumably help the stretching problem, it would not help the fact that they are now compressing the hell out of our assets. I notice that your example does not have any fine text or lines. 

[Offthahorse]

youre right about the compression. however the compression problem is made much worse by the streching in most of these examples. my thumbnail does have text, but its not very visible due to the compression

[steve_web]

The jpeg lossy compression is the main issue.

None of my screenshots are squished to fit, but ALL of them show major compression artifacts because the compression was set waaaaay too high! <--- this is the issue!

[peter9477]

There are two unrelated issues, one being the overcompression and the other being incorrect stretching of portrait mode shots. Or, to be more precise, the distortion of the aspect ratio. Whatever they're submitted as should be how they're left...