Photograph six screens of the app, and frame them for the store

[andiwand]

The last of the stack: #165 (odrcore 6.7.1), #166 (the onboarding) and #167 (opening a document at its top) are all merged, so this is against main and is purely the screenshot work.

The store copy beside these is written, so it lives in git and the release uploads what is committed. A screenshot is not written, it is taken: it is worth what the build it came off is worth, and a picture of 1.38 sitting in git through 1.41 is a picture of an app nobody can install. So these are taken during the release run, from the build going out, framed there, and handed to deliver from there. Nothing is committed; .gitignore already said as much.

bundle exec fastlane ios screenshots

What a set is

Six pictures per device — the folder, a text document, a spreadsheet with its sheet tabs, an edit under way, a pdf and a Word file — on a 6.9" iPhone and a 13" iPad. Both, because an app that runs on both has to hand in both.

Nine of the eleven store locales are photographed in their own language. hi and sv are given the English set, because the app has no Hindi or Swedish UI either — copied in rather than left out, since a locale deliver uploads nothing for keeps whatever the last release put there.

The framing

A raw simulator capture is not what a store listing looks like. Each one is set on a coloured ground, in a phone-shaped frame, under two lines of copy in that locale's language, with a row of format chips beside it.

Nothing is drawn from an image file. Every part of it is a rounded rectangle, a plain rectangle or a line of text, so a new device size is a change to numbers rather than new artwork. fastlane/frames/frames.json holds the whole design and scripts/frame-screenshots.py draws it. The one asset is Nunito, under the OFL, which ships beside its licence.

scripts/frame-screenshots.py --locale en-US    # one locale, for a look

Nothing is tapped to get there

The way to a document is the document browser, which is Apple's UI in eleven languages and a different tap in each. So the app takes -ODRScreenshot text in Debug builds and puts itself on that screen: one launch per picture, and each waits for the view to say it has something to show rather than for a number of seconds. ScreenshotMode.swift is the whole of it, and it reads nil in a Release build.

The folder holds twenty-seven documents. Nine are the real ones the other screenshots open; the rest are copies of those under names of their own, never opened, because a folder of nine reads as an app nobody keeps anything in.

The documents are localized too, which is most of what a reader has to show. They are not committed: the lane runs scripts/make-screenshot-documents.py before it builds, because they are build output and nothing but a screenshot run opens them. It writes 81 files — nine formats in nine languages — byte for byte reproducible, so a rerun that changes no wording writes the same bytes. EXCLUDED_SOURCE_FILE_NAMES = "sample-*" keeps them out of the archive that ships.

The app builds without them, and CI compiles the screenshot target without them, which is all CI does with it — both checked.

The device is drawn to Apple's own dimensions

The phone and the tablet are drawn, not pasted from a mockup, so they are the shape of whatever was captured. What they are drawn to is measured rather than guessed: the bezel comes from the published body and display sizes (2.54mm on the phone, 8.44mm on the iPad), and the display corner, the Dynamic Island, and the side buttons' positions and lengths were measured off Apple's own bezel artwork. The metal is lit across the band's own width, which is what makes an edge read as turned rather than as a grey stripe.

Two departures from that artwork are deliberate: the device is cropped by the canvas, and it casts a shadow. Both would have to go if we ever moved to Apple's frames, whose licence forbids redistributing them anyway - so they are not in this repository and there is nothing to download at release time.

One real fix came out of it

Photographing the iPad turned up a bug that has nothing to do with screenshots: a pdf or a Word document opened part way down its own first page, with the heading cut off. That is #167, now merged.

The release run

A screenshots job beside build rather than behind it: it signs nothing, it just drives simulators. It runs on a dry run too, and archives both the framed set and the raw captures — the raw ones are where to look when a picture comes out wrong.

The lane picks the newest iOS the runner has and a simulator that runs it, because the same model name exists on several runtimes and a picture taken on last year's iOS shows last year's buttons. ODR_SCREENSHOT_IOS, ODR_SCREENSHOT_DEVICES and ODR_SCREENSHOT_LANGUAGES override each by hand.

scripts/store-screenshots.py owns what a full set is: which locales, which screens, and the sizes App Store Connect accepts. It reads the size off each PNG rather than trusting the simulator's name. The listing job then stages the set for both apps and uploads it with the text it already uploads.

Both apps get the same pictures. They are one app built twice, and the one thing that differs on screen — the banner Lite carries — is not in a screenshot either way. The set is taken with the Pro scheme, which links no ad sdk and so cannot raise a consent form in front of the camera.

Checked

• a full English set was captured on both devices and framed: store-screenshots.py reports no problem against en-US, and names the other eight as missing, which is what an incomplete run should do
• the six screens come out right on both devices — headings intact, the folder listing all twenty-seven, the search hit highlighted
• every generated package is a valid ODF or OOXML zip, and the generator is idempotent
• Fastfile parses, and the runtime and simulator resolution pick the right two out of real simctl list devices output
• both workflows parse, and project.pbxproj reopens with the UI test target intact
• the hand-off to snapshot is ours — OpenDocumentReaderUITests/Snapshots.swift, 115 lines — rather than fastlane's vendored 320-line helper, so scripts/format.sh now covers every Swift source here without an exception

Worth knowing before merge

• Only English has been regenerated. The other eight languages keep the sheet they had — four quarters and twenty rows, against English's six months and forty. Each is internally consistent; they differ from each other until the rest follow.
• The filler names are English in the other eight locales. They fall back the way a language with no samples of its own is photographed with the English set, so the German folder shows Meeting notes beside Quartalsbericht.
• A full regeneration would rewrite the eight non-English .ods, whose figure columns are still at the old single width. Nothing else drifts.
• The sample documents and the eleven headlines are worded by me, and did not get the translator-and-reviewer pass the store copy in Write the store copy ahead of the release, and translate the app again #162 got.
• The first dry_run release run is the first look at all nine locales at once.

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