OHO's Blog

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Useful Trick to Gather Apple Icon With Applied or Not Glossy Effect

If you want to retreive just one iOS app icon with glossy effect, it’s quite easy. You can drag and drop it from iTunes application (see a previous post). You’ll even have the transparent rounded corner.

But if you want it programaticaly so that you can run an automated system and have it on the fly for a web site (example: my couple years ago test of iWebkit framework) there is a trick for it. I haven’t really found any documentation on this anywhere. So here are my findings.

It’s an icon url re-naming trick

Method:

  1. Lookup your app info using Search API (ex: http://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=284910350)

  2. Get the 512x512 app icon url (value of artworkUrl512 within returned JSON)

  3. Replace “.png” by “.175x175-75.png” from the url

That’s it, doing this you’ll get a 175x175 size icon with glossy effect (if specified by UIPrerenderedIcon) generated by Apple + the transparent rounded corner.

That’s the best you can do so far (to my empirique experience) if you want to retreive from an automated system a transparent rounded corner app with glossy effect when applied.

litle command line to get 175x175 transparent rounded corner icon with glossy effect

Replace in the bellow decomposed command line the looked-up ID with your own app ID.

curl 'http://itunes.apple.com/fr/lookup?id=525463029' # Get the JSON with meta info of your app
curl 'http://itunes.apple.com/fr/lookup?id=525463029' | grep -Po '"artworkUrl512":.*?[^\\]",' | perl -pe 's/"artworkUrl512"://; s/^"//; s/",$//' # exctract the 512x512 icon url. 
curl 'http://itunes.apple.com/fr/lookup?id=525463029' | grep -Po '"artworkUrl512":.*?[^\\]",' | perl -pe 's/"artworkUrl512"://; s/^"//; s/",$//' | perl -pe 's/\.png/.175x175-75.png/g' # do the string replace of ".png" with ."175x175-75.png"

Notes:

  • if your app is not available in France, choose your country name and replace /fr/ with it. Or just remove the “/fr/” part after http://itunes.apple.com (default would be “us”).

  • you can play with different values of 175x175-75 as this seems to be hardcoded by Apple with some predefined working sizes used in differents area (like iTunes web version). 175x175 is the bigest I could find (by hand). If you feel like doing a litle script to test all sizes and resolutions, just send your results or script to me and I’ll update the post.

  • some apps have already updated their icon with 1024x1204 size. It’s for instance the case of Goodreader! At the time this post was writen, Apple did not yet update Search API JSON format and this 1024x1024 icon size is behind artworkUrl512 key (see command line result for AdamID: 306277111).

  • this quick command line might not work for all apps as some very rare case of icon URL are pointing to .TIFF image formats! Yes!!! This is for instance the cases of iBooks 512x512 icon from Apple.

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