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The appxmanifest has entries for developers to fill in four different tile resolution images for each kind of tile (small, medium, wide, large), the different resolutions are: scale-180, scale-140, scale-100, scale-80.

From what I can tell if the developer fills in the largest resolution image (scale-180) the system will automatically scale it down when needed on lower resolution displays, thus it works everywhere. So do most developers really even need to bother filling in all the different tile resolution images? Seems like it will just bloat the size of the application for nothing.

My question about filling in the different resolution images not about whether I need to have the small, medium, wide and large images.

satur9nine
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  • Finally the point is you will have to fill it as it is recomended by microsoft. And since Microsoft asks for vector Images so You may design the image accordingly and that to better if transparent one. with a uniform background color. – Pratim Sep 11 '13 at 02:30

2 Answers2

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It's certainly not necessary, but it is recommended. Scaling images down (or up) can cause visual artifacts that may not be present in the original image. It may be the case that a particular image looks fine in all scaling plateaus, but others may not (this is especially true for bitmap images). Again, it is up to your discretion, but worth visual inspection at each scaling level.

MSDN has a scaling guidelines document that could be helpful.

Nathan Kuchta
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  • I'm only talking about scaling images down. The Microsoft automatic scaling looks fine to my eyeballs, I don't think they aren't using nearest neighbor. Besides if Microsoft doesn't do the scaling then I'll being doing it using something like Photoshop, I assume the results are going to be really similar. – satur9nine Sep 10 '13 at 21:56
  • It looks like the scaling routine used by Windows produces an image that might be a **tiny** bit less sharp than one produced by photoshop, gimp or some other image editing app with a decent scaling routine. – satur9nine Sep 11 '13 at 21:40
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See the reasons for filling wide tile and small tiles are for different reason. 1 - wide tile

if your app has a live tile notification feature then u need to implement it. But not mandatory. Just a criteria of metro app.

2 - small tile. This is the by default tile of the application so you should go ahead and add it. If theres no live tile concept then you can fill only small tile. The square one.

3 - then there is a place to put in the image that will be used as a tile icon when user searches for it.

and then there is store logo.

all these are by default set to one cross marked logo. Which u generally see. None of them are mandatory but finally while uploading to the store they will become requirement specific and mandatory. Otherwise you will get a long list of improvements to be done on your app from microsoft. :) . Have faced that .

Anobik
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  • See Microsoft has a promotion policy for their apps. So these guidelines are necessary. Ur almost right but the filling entire criteria at a Go is not so easy. And mainly the Images need to be created using adobe only i think. – Pratim Sep 11 '13 at 02:32
  • Some one down voted next time please leave a reply why this is not an answer to the question : is it really necessary...... ? – Anobik Sep 11 '13 at 02:53
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    This doesn't really answer my question. I am asking about the need to supply images at different resolutions, not about the tile sizes (small, medium, wide, large). – satur9nine Sep 11 '13 at 21:17
  • Ok. I shared my experience that why it is necessary in the last paragraph i wrote :) – Anobik Sep 12 '13 at 01:30
  • Actually it happened like this. I posted my app with live tile notification and without a wide tile support. So they mailed back saying that please provide all other resolution image as it supports live tiles or else it will not be promoted / recommended by microsoft. Thats why i described everything. Some thing ok to us might not be actually ok. While going to the store. After all its their choice and recommendation. I hope now u will understand better. Had you asked for a clarification earlier :D – Anobik Sep 12 '13 at 01:41
  • And yes there are about 30 + criteria to full fill. – Anobik Sep 12 '13 at 01:43