Once you have a general idea of the direction your app will take, ask yourself what type of content you need and pull it all toghether. When you get started with your app, one way to keep it moving smoothly is organziation and making sure your assets are the proper quality, file types, and ready to be placed in your app.
Assets
Organize your files
•Begin by creating a folder of each asset type, e.g., video, audio, images.
•It helps to create your asset library in an orderly way, but you can always rename any files in your library after they have been uploaded.
•Try to keep your file names simple, like Site 1, Site 2... or 01-Introduction, 02-"Site Name".
•Depending on the complexity of your app and how many tours or points of interest you have, you may want to come up with a naming convention that keeps all the files of one tour together. Once your files are uploaded into your project library, they will be alphabetized, so having two images labeled "Site 1" may become confusing. Try titling the file something like "Tour Name"-01.
•Think about other project users that are helping you create the app. If they were to look at all the content in your asset library, would they be able to note which files should be placed on the page for Tour 2 - Site 4?
Images
Acceptable file types are: PNG, JPG, and GIF
File Sizes
Having a large file size will take longer to upload and can result in a slower user experience depending on connectivity. Generally, there is no stong reason to have high resolution images in your app. Play it safe and upload files that are a reasonable size and resolution. If you're looking at all of your image file sizes and see 900KB or even 1.5MB, we would encourage you to try to make them smaller before you upload them.
Recommended resolution for image files is 72dpi.
File sizes should generally be saved to fall below 100KB. However, if you are optimizing for iPad and have images that fill the enitre size of the screen, your images will most likely hover in the 140-180KB range.
Image Sizes
Consider screen sizes across hundreds of devices - they all vary. If you upload a file into your app that is only 300px wide, it will look small on a tablet device - we can not serve an image to a device that is larger than the original file that was uploaded. To determine how wide your file should be consider these device dimensions:
- iPhone 4 retina display 640px X 960px
- iPad 768px X 1024px
We like to target our images so they also look good on tablets, so we generally upload images that are roughly 640px to1024px wide when possible. This may not always be possible because most likely your image files are trickling in over time from different sources and you will encounter images of varying quality and sizes. Try your best to keep them in a consistent, moderate range and you'll be fine.
Icons
You can add an app icon to your project at anytime. You may also choose to have image thumbnails display with your list of sites. In both instances we would recommend files that are 114px X 114px for smartphones and 144x144px for tablets.
Video
Acceptable file types are: mp4, .mov, .avi, .mpeg, .m4v
As with image files, it's good to consider resolution and file size. Will you be providing onsite devices, such as iPod touches? If so, you should target your files accordingly.
Going into true HD is probably not that useful for a 3.5" x 5" screen-- maybe for the ipad, but it still has excess leftover. Assuming that you aren't working with pro gear, we can assume the videos people are making are either in standard 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios, not the 9x5 ratios that are technically the dimensions of smartphones. For those who are intending for a project to be used mostly on the ipad, the minimum resolution for 16:9 aspect ratios should be 640x360 and the maximum 1280x720. For 4:3 aspect ration, the minimum should be 640x480. For smartphones we can downscale a bit further... 320x180 for 16:9 and 320x240 for 4:3.
To learn more about DIY video, check out our blog post.
Audio
Acceptable file type is .MP3
If your audio files are not MP3 files, you can always convert them using an audio conversion program. Whether you're a Mac or Windows person, there are many programs available to do this.
If you have audio that already exists, the odds are, you will be perfectly fine using them in your tour.
If you're creating new audio, we personally don't find it will make or break you sound quality for going higher than 128kbps, mostly you are trying to maximize file size capacity. The MP3s we make are usually at 192kbps or higher (around 256), which makes 128kbs the minimum for most uses. For most of these applications we feel that 128kbs isn't a significant downgrade in sound quality. The majority of users are using little earbuds with their smartphones, so the difference in quality is generally not noticeable.
To learn more about DIY audio, check out our blog post.
Text
You can always type out your text as you build each page in your app. Another approach is to have one nice text file broken down by pages in your tour. You can then quickly copy and paste chunks of text at a time. Use the formatting palette in our builder to make adjustments to font size, style, centering, and links.