Over the past few weeks, I’ve been diving into iphone application development. In many ways this is a return to the first professional app development I did in my software career: writing NeXTSTEP apps for US West in Minneapolis.

The learning curve wasn’t too bad up until this weekend, when I hit an odd little snag. I was trying to create some custom icons for a tab bar controller. So I downloaded some PNG files I found on line, added them to my project, and tried to set them as the tab bar button images – but the images just wouldn’t show up! I scoured the web for clues to this problem and came across several sites that mentioned the issue, but no actual solutions. Finally, I downloaded some PNG files from a sample project from Apple and compared these files to mine. I noticed that my files didn’t have an alpha channel. Not being a Photoshop whiz, it took a while to find this blog entry that explains in plain English how to add an alpha channel to a PNG file.

This blog post turned out to be a lifesaver. But it would have saved me hours if Apple had mentioned this in their documentation. (Yes, they do say “use white with appropriate alpha”, but how does that translate into “if your images don’t have an alpha channel, they won’t display at all”?)

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