iPhone Developer Tips Visitor Stats:
126,691 Pageviews and 94,296 visitors in the past 30 days.

Remove Shine / Gloss Effect on iPhone Icon

Posted on July 27, 2009 by John Muchow in General

By default, when building an application with Xcode, your icon will have a round beveling of the corners and a shine added over the top of the icon. The icon below shows how this looks:

You can override this default by following line to you to the Info.plist file. For example, if you prefer to edit Info.plist as a source file, add the following line:

<key>UIPrerenderedIcon</key>
<true/>

If you are editing Info.plist as an XML file (in Xcode) you can add an entry that looks as follows:

Depending on your configuration and version of Xcode, the option in the Info.plist file may looks as follows:

With the pre-rendered icon set to true, the icon shown above will now look like this:

This preference setting only applies to removing of the shine / glossy effect, the corners of your icon will still be rounded for you.

Share with iOS Developers:

Comments

10 Responses to “Remove Shine / Gloss Effect on iPhone Icon”

jimi says:

August 17, 2009 at 7:52 pm

What a useful post! Thanks! :)
Mk12 says:

August 20, 2009 at 8:29 pm

Instead of setting the value to ‘YES’, you can right click (or control-click) on the value field and under ‘Value Type’ select Boolean. Then you can just check the box instead of typing YES.
Thomas S. Nielsen says:

January 23, 2010 at 1:31 pm

Thanks a lot! Just what I needed. You can find it in the dropdown box of a new key value as “Icon already includes gloss and bevel effects”.
Serge says:

January 28, 2010 at 10:27 am

Thanks!
Exactly what I was looking for … but was unable to find anywhere else.
Edouard D. says:

April 26, 2010 at 10:17 am

Thanks for sharing this. Very useful.
Ricki says:

May 12, 2010 at 5:56 am

Thanks!
Very concise and covers all different approaches, good job!
John says:

May 15, 2010 at 5:06 pm

I don’t see either option listed in the choices for new key value (listed as raw values or not) when editing the info.plist in Xcode 3.2.2. I can type UIPrerenderedIcon by hand but this gives me an uneasy feeling because the rest of you seem to see it in the list.
John Muchow says:

May 15, 2010 at 7:53 pm

It seems that depending on the version of Xcode you are using, the list of options vary. I’ve had to manually enter values as well. As long as you know it’s an option, you’re half way there :)
Alex Humphreys says:

August 4, 2010 at 8:45 pm

Thanks for the post, found this though Google. I was just making all the icons on my iPhone 4 high resolution, and I needed to be able to turn off the gloss.

And by the way, unlike what Md12 mentioned above, do not use a boolean, you must use a string with the value “YES”.
booJenkins says:

August 16, 2010 at 9:58 am

Yeah, i didnt realize the became outdated,
after reInstalling the app, and using:
| UIPrerenderedIcon | YES |

It worked, thanks a bunch!