Fred: Android drawable resizing tool
How many times have you ever had to open your favourite image editor to resize the same image for Android's various screen sizes and densities?
I know that's a pain, and that's why I created Fred.
Presenting Fred
Fred stands for Friendly Resizer Droid. It's a tool that automatically resizes a bunch of images to the various screen densities of Android devices.
Purpose
When developing/designing for Android, you have to deal with a bunch of different screen sizes and resolutions. If you design your layouts following the design guidelines and develop them using properly the SDK, you'll have no trouble. Android do all the hard work for you.
But if you don't supply different versions of your image resources for the different screen sizes, Android will do that at runtime. And, this way, your app will be slow. Thus, is always a good idea to supply images on the drawable-xhdpi, drawable-hdpi, drawable-mdpi and (maybe) drawable-ldpi folders.
But do this in an image editor (like Photoshop) takes time. And it's extremely boring. So why lose time doing that? Fred can do this job for you! And trust me, he would be very happy to help.
How it works
While designing your layouts, use the Nexus 4 and its resolution (1280x768) as the base. After that, slice and export all your image resources.
Then, launch Fred and drag and drop the folder with the images on it. Fred will resize all and create the drawable-xhdpi, drawable-hdpi, drawable-mdpi and (maybe) drawable-ldpi folders for you. After that, just move them to your Android project.
Can I use it?
If this is not the first time you read this blog, that's not a smart question :) As always, every tool I release is free, and Fred is not a different case.
Fred is free and open source, and its source code is hosted on Github. Go check it out: https://github.com/leocadiotine/fred.
Usage
Download the executable jar and double-click it. Fred's window will appear. Drag a folder from your file explorer and drop on it.
You need to have Java installed to run Fred.
Hope Fred saves all of you (designers and developers alike) a lot of time!