344 CHAPTER 9: Android Graphic Design: Making Your UI Designs Visual
A cool trick you can use in the GIMP File ➤ Export dialog to speed up your folder navigation is
to click on any of your folder levels, which are shown in boxes at the top of the dialog, to take you
directly to that folder. So, to go from the drawable-xxhdpi folder to the drawable-xhdpi folder rapidly,
click on the res box at the top between the HelloWorld box and the drawable-xxhdpi box, and then
double-click to select drawable-xhdpi, in the center area of the dialog, and Voila! You will be in the
next folder that you need to save in! Since your file name is the same, you do not need to edit the
value in the Name field at all, simply click the Export button at this point and export the file. Then
do the Edit ➤ Undo Scale Image, the Image ➤ Scale to create your next resolution assets, and
perform the same rapid File ➤ Export As work process.
All of this might seem like a ton of work, but you will be amazed at how rapidly you can
generate all these files, once you develop your optimal work process. I timed myself doing the
imagebutton3press.png button state in all 5 resolutions, and it took me 3 minutes to go through
this entire scaling process, so, 12 minutes for all 4 states times 3 buttons yields 36 minutes. So
creating all 60 assets should take you around an hour, or a minute per image. I’d say that’s an
acceptable average! If you have any clients who are conceptualizing Android development as being
a bit easier than it actually is, simply have them purchase and read this book!
An important take-away from this section of the chapter is that using any modern day digital image
editing and compositing software, and even an IDE software such as Eclipse, is going to be a highly
“modal” user experience. In GIMP, the tool that you have selected works on the color channel
that you have selected inside of the layer that you have selected using tool options that you have
specified, and all of these mode settings are then applied to the pixels in the image, which you “run
Figure 9-30. The purple hue, and using Export Image dialog to save the hover ImageButton state to XXHDPI