Image and icon support

Icon support

• The following image formats are supported for MIDlet icons:

  • BMP

  • EXIF

  • GIF

  • JPEG

  • MBM

  • MNG

  • PNG

  • TIFF

  • WBMP

  • ICO

  • WMF

  • SVG (S60 3rd Edition FP 2 and newer)

• Transparency (both simple and alpha transparency) is supported.

• No animation supported for MIDlet icons.

• For SVG support, see section Scalable icon support.

In S60 devices, the icon defined in the MIDlet-Icon attribute is used only if the MIDlet-<n> icon is not defined. Note that the MIDlet suite icon or MIDlet icon is shown in Canvas or Screen (Form, List, and TextBox) status pane in S60 3rd Edition FP 1 devices, but not in Series 40 devices or S60 3rd Edition FP2 and newer devices.

The following tables describe the size of MIDlet icons in S60 and Series 40 devices with different display resolutions:

LCDUI UI element icon support

The icon sizes for List, ChoiceGroup and Alert in different device resolutions are listed in the following table. These are default values and should be considered for informative purposes only as these may differ even between devices with the same resolution.

You can get the device-specific maximum width and height for LIST_ELEMENT, CHOICE_GROUP_ELEMENT and ALERT image types by using the getBestImageWidth and getBestImageHeight methods.

Series 40 devices include the following screen sizes:

In S60 devices the screen layouts used with Lists are determined by the following parameters:

• Whether there is a selection graphic (EXCLUSIVE, MULTIPLE) or not (IMPLICIT);

• Whether the text needs one or two lines (List.TEXT_WRAP_OFF / List.TEXT_WRAP_ON).

Depending on these three parameters, List items might use a smaller or larger space. If a smaller space is required, the LIST_ELEMENT icon is replaced by the corresponding CHOICE_GROUP_ELEMENT icon.

Scalable icon support

From S60 3rd edition FP2 onwards, the platform supports Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG-T version 1.1) icons as Java MIDlet icons whereas earlier platform versions supported only PNG icons and other bitmap graphics formats. Since there is a multitude of devices with different resolutions that show the MIDlet icons in different sizes, providing also SVG icons in the MIDlet makes the application icons generally look better in S60 devices.

It is recommended that for backwards compatibility you should also provide alternative PNG icons which can then be used if the device does not support SVG files or is otherwise unable to render them.

Nokia specific attributes Nokia-Scalable-Icon and Nokia-Scalable-Icon-MIDlet-<n> are used to provide scalable MIDlet icons. These Nokia specific attributes have priority over the standard MIDP attributes in the icon lookup order. The icon file names and paths may contain spaces (U+0020). The icon file name is encoded as UTF-8 .

The S60 SDK is bundled with a tool to convert normal SVG icons to SVG Tiny format that optimizes the SVG icon for the S60 SVG Engine.

On S60 3rd edition FP 2 also the standard MIDlet suite and MIDlet icon attributes can contain SVG icon names. However, it is recommended that for backwards compatibility you should provide only PNG icons in these standard attributes and use the Nokia-Scalable-Icon attributes for providing the scalable icons. Doing this allows PNG icons to be presented in devices without SVG support and devices having SVG support will use the scalable icons for the same MIDlet.

To assign an SVG icon to a MIDlet, see the following code:

	MIDlet-1: HelloWorldMIDlet, /bitmap_icon.png , example.hello.HelloWorldMIDlet 
	Nokia-Scalable-Icon-MIDlet-1: /scalable_icon.svg

If SVG-T icons are not supported by the platform, the SVG file is not used. It is possible to provide the link to the SVG file in the MIDlet-Icon attribute.

If none of the MIDlet icons are supported by the implementation, the MIDlet suite icon is used. If none of the MIDlet suite icons are supported, the implementation uses a system default icon. If at any step the specified image file is in unsupported format or is corrupted, or the specified image cannot be found, then the lookup proceeds to the next step.