Graphical asset managment for Universal app using retina display on iPhone

[scotopia]

Hey All,

I've been reading the docs regarding making use of the retinal display and it seems kind of awkward and cumbersome (creating high rez copies of your assets with a suffix in the filename). I'm hoping there is a cleaner way of doing that for my set up.
The app I'm working on is a Universal app; for example lets just consider one asset: MyPic.png which is 512x512. When displaying on the iPad I want this asset to appear 512x512 and when on the iPhone I want it to appear as 256x256, but using the retinal display (so the asset used would be 512x512). So, it seems all I really should need is this one 512x512 asset. Is there anyway to have this set up at such without having to make duplicate versions of files?

It seems like it should be straightforward:

If its displaying on iPad draw asset as is
If iphone draw as 256x256 but utilizing retinal display (so using same asset).

Note: This is a new app so I'm not worried about supporting pre-retinal display iPhones.

Thanks in advance.

[scotopia]

Am I missing something obvious?

[smithdale87]

I think the simplest way is just going to be to use the iPhone's built in mechanisms for managing which images to use for the retina display and so forth.

I stumbled across an article here: 2010 August | Sparrow | Hatch your App! (scroll down to the part about "creating the graphics") in which the mentioned framework provides a script that will automatically create all of the variations for the graphics and put the @2x suffix on the filename and so forth. It may be worth downloading those utilities even if you dont find the framework useful.

[scotopia]

Thanks for the reply smithdale.

I guess I just don't see the need to create duplicate files in my bundle when they are unnecessary; all I want to do is use the exact same assets for the iPad and iPhone(retina) versions.

[scotopia]

I've been away from the development scene for a while; has anything changed as far as asset management protocols / standard techniques since I originally asked this question? Thanks!