Victor, you should use a “Universal build” if you want one app to support both iPhone/iPods and iPads. However supporting different form factors is not a trivial task and it takes some different ways of thinking.
One school of thought, which I try to use involves having an oversized background that will fill both tall, thin devices like the iPhone 5 while at the same time fill short wide devices like the iPad and the iPhone 3/4’s will be in the middle. For this to work, some of the background will not show on some screens. The background “bleeds” off the screen a bit. You cannot put critical artwork in these areas and you have to think a little bit differently about how you position things so that they move automatically to fit the screen shape in use. It was the idea behind this blog post:
http://www.coronalabs.com/blog/2012/12/04/the-ultimate-config-lua-file/
It takes a bit to digest and I won’t lie, there are complexities to it.
The other school of thought is to use a fixed scale, understand that some of your coordinates may be negative numbers (i.e. 0, 0 is not necessarily the top left of the device). and that you use code to load in device shape specific backgrounds. This isn’t real code but should help you get the idea:
if device is iPad then
background = display.newImageRect(“background-ipad.png”, 768, 1024)
elseif device is iPhone 5 then
background = display.neImageRect(“background-iphone5.png”, 640, 1136)
else
background = display.neImageRect(“background-iphone5.png”, 640, 960)
end
It requires more code and multiple files, but you can make your background fit your screen better. I actually did a kid’s app where I had to use both techniques together.
I had a unique iPhone 5 background that I had to use because of where certain graphic elements were placed on it, but I used the ultimate config.lua to create the content area.
Read that post, perhaps several times and try to digest it.
Rob
