The App Business Blog

I have commented about developers who do not take the time to display a proper name under the app icon before on this blog.

Recently I experienced a variation on this issue. An app that I was working on was a universal app (both iPhone and iPad). The name of the app fit perfectly under the app icon on the iPad, but on the iPhone (where the icon is smaller) the name got truncated with the ugly … in the middle of the name.

As you may recall, the best way to control the name that is displayed under the app icon is to create an entry in the InfoPlist.strings file like this:

"CFBundleDisplayName" = "YourAppName";

Instead of resorting to abbreviating the name on the iPad just so that it would fit on the iPhone, I wondered if there was a way to have different strings for each platform. After some experimentation it turns out that there is. And it’s quite logical too. Just add the usual ~iphone and ~ipad suffixes after the key, and it just works.

"CFBundleDisplayName~iphone" = "iPhoneName";
"CFBundleDisplayName~ipad" = "iPadNameLong";

written by Nick \\ tags: CFBundleDisplayName

Jeff LaMarche has a post on how to change the name of an application as it appears on the iPhone’s home screen.

Here’s an alternative way to do it using the localization features of OS X:

1. Create an en.lproj directory if your project doesn’t already have one. 
2. Inside the en.lproj directory create a file called InfoPlist.strings.
3. Add this line to the file: “CFBundleDisplayName” = “YourNewAppName”;

 

written by Nick \\ tags: CFBundleDisplayName, InfoPlist.strings