CHAPTER 3: An Introduction to the Android Application Development Platform 91You have successfully finished the transparent Android launcher icon work process, in only eight
steps. This is the basic work process necessary to extract your icon graphic elements and place
them onto a transparent background.
Next, we will take a look at the work process to create all of the required resolution density assets
(MDPI, HDPI, XHDPI, and XXHDPI; LDPI and XXXHDPI are not currently required) that you will need
to have in place in order to properly support the wide range of Android consumer electronics devices
in the marketplace, ranging from smartwatches to smartphones to eBook readers to tablets to
laptops to iTV sets to 4K iTVs and probably beyond!
Creating Resolution Density App Launch Icons
To create the launcher icons needed for your Android application, we will use the GIMP Image
Scaling Algorithm to “downsample” the 200 pixels in the current “source” image to the 144-,
96-, 72-, and 48-pixel resolution “destination” images that we need for the alternate resource folders.
Use the Image ➤ Scale Image menu sequence to do this in GIMP, as shown in Figure 3-15.
Figure 3-15. Use the Image ➤ Scale Image menu sequence to scale the 200-pixel graphic to be a 144-pixel icon