Is it obliged to use Assets.xcassets?

user_10885225 0
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I would like to know if we were to put our images in the xcode Assets.xcasset or an image file could be enough?

Thank you

sprite-kit assets swift image ios
2 Answers

No. It is not required to use .xcassets files. You can also just add images and other resources to your Xcode project.

However I would always use Asset Catalogs if possible, because it gives you powerful features, such as using different images for different devices/gamuts/etc.

user_2431920

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/219/

From WWDC 2018:

"...for artwork that comes with your application, we strongly encourage you to use image assets. And there are a number of reasons why."

Some of those reasons:

  • "Image assets are optimized for name based and trait-based lookup. It's faster to look up an image asset in the asset catalog, than it is to search for files on disk that have a certain naming scheme."

  • "managing buffer sizes"

  • "...per device thinning, which mean that your application only downloads image resources that are relevant to the device that it's going to run on and vector artwork."

  • Vector artwork optimization: "...if your image gets rendered in an image view that is larger or smaller than the native size of the image it doesn't get blurry. The image is, actually, re-rasterized from the vector artwork... The asset catalog compiler has, actually, already produced a pre-rasterized version of that image and stored it in the asset catalog. So, rather than doing the complicated math of rasterizing your vector artwork into a bitmap, we can just decode that image that's stored in the asset catalog and render it directly into the frame buffer."

This is not an exhaustive list, click the link for more. So to answer the question, using the asset catalog is certainly not required, but it would be foolish not to use it for artwork that is delivered with the application for the reasons mentioned.

user_90867700
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