Trim iOS Screenshots, Made Easy

With every release of SaxoTrader, I have the trusted privilege of removing the status bar from the screenshots for the App Store.

I don’t have to remind you to remove the status bar from your App Store screenshots, do I? I still see them a lot on the App Store.

In any case, with SaxoTrader translated into 18 languages, 12 for the App Store, and with five screenshots for both iPhone and iPad, we’re talking 120 screenshots.

Normally I use Acorn and its bundled Crop Images Automator action. But this time I wanted to “outsource” the task back to the project owner who made the screenshots in the first place. However, he doesn’t have Acorn…

So I rolled my own stand-alone Automator action, wrapped it in a workflow, bundled into an application he can drag and drop the screenshots onto – whether generated in iOS Simulator (⌘S) or directly on the devices:

Trim Selected iOS Screenshots Automator Application

I chose to first develop a Foundation command line utility and then the action which embeds and uses the utility. The utility can also be used independently if desired (that’s what’s I’m doing). Ideally, it should double as an XPC service, but I managed to contain myself.

You’ve guessed what this leads up to: the source and compiled binaries are available on GitHub.

If you ever find yourself fiddling with various crop tools to get rid of the status bar on your App Store screenshots, and you should, you might find it useful. Whether you’re a CLI or GUI type of guy.

  1. osteslag posted this
blog comments powered by Disqus