How to take screenshots with watch "frame" for the store

3649079 said:

Alternatively merge the full overlay and image, make it square, then resize to 500 by 500.

Do you actually have to resize to 500 x 500? I think those are the recommended dimensions, but I just tried to set an image with a much higher resolution (2363 px wide) as a listing image and it worked. (It was a low quality JPG, to keep the size under 150 KB.)

My existing listing image was 700 x 700 and it was fine. So you might be able to get away with simply cropping the image to a square, and reducing the quality like _psx_ said.

My main pet peeve, which I will never stop mentioning, is that the store website distorts any images which aren't square without warning.

EDIT: "CIQ development is complicated, let's make it slightly more complicated! Developers like unnecessary complexity, right?"

Thanks

One of the bugs then is that the Overlay provided by Garmin exceeds the size in KB of what you are allowed to upload, that's without the screen image.

FlowState said:

CIQ development is complicated, let's make it slightly more complicated!

lol

Absolutely the greater the challenge the greater the reward! Otherwise anyone might do it!

If you want challenge you can try to do animated app icon in store. :-)

Just the amount of chit-chatting in this thread proves my point that this feature should be available by 1 click

Something people often forget is to make the area outside the watch transparant. 

It's less of an issue now as connect iq app background is now also white (in connect it was black)

The interesting issues of shape and transparency could be avoided if the "Save Screen Capture" produced the correctly formatted image - then all images would appear correctly in the store and apps.

It should be noted that some photo editors, such as the famous Microsoft Photo Editor [and perhaps Paint.exe], don't handle transparency well whereas Paint 3D [Windows 10] does.

So which version of PC OS you have is important unless a bespoke editor is used.

peterdedecker said:

It's less of an issue now as connect iq app background is now also white (in connect it was black)

Just to revisit this, at least on iOS it depends on your system theme (light vs dark). I don't know about the Android app.

If your phone is in dark mode, the Connect IQ background will be black, just like Garmin Connect. If your phone is in light mode, it will be light grey, not pure white.

In light mode, I can still see the contrast between the CIQ background and one of my app icons which has a pure white background and rounded corners. (Which is to say that the rounded corners / transparency still make a difference for me regardless of whether the user is in light mode or dark mode. It's still pretty jarring for me to see app icons with white background and square corners in the store, even in light mode, since I can easily distinguish white on light grey.)

I also noticed Garmin themselves use transparency for their CIQ app icons, so they look good in both light and dark mode.

Anyway, all of this proves that it isn't enough to go by our own experience, since it's not likely that every dev is going to test their app icon on every combo of platforms and light/dark mode - e.g.

- CIQ website

- Connect IQ iOS (light mode)

- Connect IQ iOS (dark mode)

- Connect IQ Android (light mode)

- Connect IQ Android (dark mode)

Plus you can only test on the Connect IQ apps after the fact (unless you use a beta app for experimentation).

That's why I think it would've been nice if:

- The store website would warn you that your app icon isn't square when you upload (and/or force it to be square by asking you to crop it)

- The store website would give you a preview of what your icon will look like in the various apps and light/dark modes (that's probably asking too much)

The CIQ team must be believers of linux. They love doing all things from scratch and assembling them together finally. Perhaps they think the third party developers should do that as well.

It would even make more sense to be able to add a cover image per device group. For example; it must be so confusing for Instinct users to see coloured watchfaces in their stores.