BlackBerry® World™ Development

[dbigham]

When PlayBook OS 2.0 was released, I enjoyed checking out the various changes, such as the changes to App World.

Something that I noticed which was a huge regression is the quality of the screenshots. They appear as though they have been downsamples to postage stamps, then blown back up partially to the size displayed in App World, and then saved using the worst quality JPEG setting known to man.

It looks terrible, and I figured it must be some glitch that would be corrected quickly, but it hasn't. My friend recently worked hard to polish his app, and published it, but was then horrified to check th app out in App World on the PlayBook and have his hard work portrayed as blurry/crappy, unreadable screenshots. As he puts it "Super Fail" on the part of App World.

What led to this embarassing situation?  Why wasn't it quickly corrected?

[peter9477]

I think you're unlikely to hear "why".

As for "quickly", if it made the cut, it should be fixed in the maintenance release we can expect shortly. If it isn't considered a high enough priority, maybe the next non-maintenance release, in a couple of months.

I suspect it was done partly to improve performance somewhere, and that it's unlikely that change will be undone overnight as it's likely the lesser of two evils. Just a guess...

[dbigham]

Thanks for the reply Peter.

While I hear you that reducing image size might have some benefit in their systems, I can't believe that such an advantage could be used to make a realistic case for the change.

This is one of those forehead slapper things that I simply don't understand, and I can't comprehend how this wasn't caught and prevented. Like you say, a "why" won't likely be made known, I just hope they fix it soon.

[Utumno]

I see the same issue with my portrait Android app. Most of Android apps are optimized for portrait.  Playbook is landscape. RIM seems to have forgotten this.

I have submitted 480x360 screenshots of my app in portrait, of course, because it's the only way it can be displayed. But in App World the screenshots are displayed in landscape mode. So they had to either show my screenshot rotated, or resize it. They opted for resizing and quality now sucks balls.

[peter9477]

Submitting 480x360 would only make things worse, as they allow up to 640x640. If you want to maintain that aspect ratio, you should probably submit 640x480, but for the PlayBook we generally use 640x375 or 375x640.

They're stretching the portrait mode ones currently, which of course totally destroys them but that, at least, is definitely a bug (as it worked fine in past releases).

[julian_d]

I've also complained about the image quality in the new O.S. I hope they will fix this soon, don't know how they could overlook something like this, that's why I like the App Store, they know how to sell and they care about quality.