More bounce to the ounce..

So, finally fixed the issue with motion detection on Galaxy Note 2 phones.

The shake to refresh and bouncing cube didnt work at all.

Turns out it is abug in Samsungs Firmware, the shake events were all being tagged as unreliable, so were being discarded.

I fixed it to ignore the unreliable tag, so they are now being let through and the Note 2 has its bounce back!

Version 3.2 on the Google Play store now..

Time off

Have had a little break from working on my apps, was nice to concentrate on my life outside of IT for a while. A few other improvements to my Google accounts means it will be easier to sell and get paid for selling my apps, so I am free to spend a bit more time on them now.

Coming up, I need to work out a solid business model for my in-development Weather Widget, to ensure I can provide viable accurate weather information on an ongoing basis. Now Google's Weather API is defunct, I can no longer get weather data  for free, so have to use a paid service, the cost of which depends on the number of users and requests for weather information.

However, the charges from the weather providers are not one off costs, but an ongoing monthly cost. Hence a user who will be charged say 99c for my weather app, will expect to be supported with weather information for the lifetime of the usage of that app, probably over several years. I have to make sure I can cover that reasonably, or perhaps start some kind of in-app billing to cover the costs.

Before that I would like to add some new styles to Photo Cube, I think an update of the available frames is long overdue, and I have a few new ideas I would like to try out.

Also if anyone has any other ideas for new Photo Cube features, let me know, now is the time for me to think about implementing them!

Another sneak peak of the Weather Widget, to wet your appetites...

Bug Fix Version 2.6

Almost finished the Motion Detection stuff, but had to release a quick bug fix version, too many Force Close issues popping up which I needed to sort out first.

Version 2.6 is on the Market/Play Store right now. It should fix all the Force Close problems that a few people have reported.

Then on to the end of Motion Detection!

Shake it like a Polaroid picture!

I am happy to report that Photo Cube 2.4 was released last week, and the new Album mode is proving as popular as I suspected.

This week I have been playing around with the Android  sensors, seeing how I can apply 3d movements of phone and tablets to Photo Cube.

The first idea is detecting shakes.

At the simplest level, it can already detect that you are shaking the phone (say 2 or 3 back and forth movements in any direction), and if you are in Album mode it can then trigger the pictures on the cube to refresh. That is pretty cool! But as there is a slight visual glitch when it updates, I am trying to work out the best way to distract from that, such as giving the cube an extra spin, or perhaps rapidly shrinking it, changing the images then restoring to the usual size. I will go with whichever looks best. I tried a simple "Refreshing from album" message but it looked ugly, I am not having that. :o)

Next, detecting a left or right movement on the phone can be used to give the cube a bit of extra spin in that appropriate direction. Still playing with that so it doesn't clash with shaking, and making it jive with the extra spin you already get when you pan your home screen left and right.

Other motion ideas would be to detect left, right, up or down movement and then perhaps bounce the cube in that direction, so you could shake the phone up, and the cube would rapidly move up, bounce off the top of the screen then return to its usual place. Same idea for backward and forward, but instead have it grow and shrink. I think the bounch off the "sides" of the screen would be accompanied by a reversal in rotation direction as well, to give more of a 3d realistic feel, kind of the same way a football changes its rotation when bounced off a wall.

The final idea is to make the background appear "behind" the phone using a 3d parallax effect; this would be done by detecting a small rotation angle of up/down, left/right, and shifting the background image a little bit down/up, right/left in response. The maths for that is pretty complex, I need to learn all about 3d rotation matrices so this will be a little harder to implement.

Of course, all these motion detection features will depend on the phone actually supporting them, so will only be enabled when the appropriate sensors exist on the phone. And as usual I will make them all optional, as using those sensors do take a little bit more battery life. However, they would only be used when the Photo Cube wallpaper is actually visible, i.e. no other app is running, and to be honest then the biggest battery drain is always the Screen itself rather than the relatively small amount of calculations Photo Cube requires.

I want to get some of these ideas finished before I move back to my other long delayed top secret app, which is still totally unique and has no equal in the market. ;o) 

Ready to release Album mode! Lots of work done the last few days, ensuring that everything works nicely when there is no SD Card, and handling the situation where it tries to use images from an Album which no longer exists, because it has been removed or renamed.

Unified the look of the thumbails also, the Picture Settings screen now shows the Album cube as a preview like the Single and Custom mode, but with an SD Card icon:

When I get round to enabling Facebook and Picasa albums in Photo Cube, it will show those icons instead for those album types. I have also speeded up this screen so it doesnt take so long to show the preview thumbnails. Less of the "Please Wait.."!

And now using the same look for the My Cubes, any saved Cube which is set to an SD Album shows that in the icon:

Finally, added a one-off question for new users to ask if they want to choose an album for Photo Cube to use. That should be the quickest way to get up and running.

So just a bit more testing for any last minute bugs and I should be good to go! Will be version 2.4.

New features coming soon.. album mode!

Sorry about the lack of updates, I have taken a 6 week break from Photo Cube for rest and to celebrate my birthday. Back to work now!

Last week I completed the Screenshot feature, which allows you to take a snap of the cube in action, without any of the distracting icons or widgets on the homescreen. You can then directly share that pic via Facebook, Whatsapp, Email, MMS, any way you like.

Now hard at work on what is probably the most requested feature, Album mode. This allows you to choose a particular photo album/directory on your sd card, then it will choose pics randomly from that album and update the cube periodically. This will be the simplest and easiest method of viewing your pics on the cube, no need do do anything other than choose an album:

Of course the Single Image and Custom Image modes will still be available for those of you who like the fine control. The Album mode will probably be the easiest to use for new users and whenever you have a new album which you want to showcase.

More technical info for anyone who cares: this is not that easy to do because of the randomness of images in the albums. I have to be careful to duplicate sides only when really necessary, e.g. when albums contain less than 6 images.

As the user is no longer cropping the pics manually I have to be intelligent about how I crop them to a square, treating Portrait and Landscape differently. The timing is also important, processing the random images is quite processor intensive, it needs to be done in the background so that any visual lag is kept to an absolute minimum as the cube is updated.

Ideally I would like a soft fade in/out of the old images to the new, but that's probably beyond the scope of the initial version, I think initially it will just update everytime the homescreen is reshown after being hidden e.g. by opening an app. Once that works I can think about making it a User Setting, e.g. change every 10 minutes, hour, 1, 2 or 3 times a day etc.

Once all that is done I would like to look at tighter integration with Facebook or other online services, would be great to be able to just choose a Facebook or Picasa album, and let Photo Cube choose pics from that online album.

Stay tuned!

Introducing My Cubes

A long awaited feature has finally arrived on Photo Cube: The ability to save your complete cube styles and quickly swap between them!

Introducing My Cubes...

Take a look at the new Manage Cubes section in the Photo Cube Settings app:

Click on My Cubes to view your gallery of saved Cubes:

Tap on a cube to load it, change its name, share it, or delete it:

So how do you save cubes to the gallery? Its easy.
Customise your cube just like you normally would. Then when you want to save it, simply hit the "Save this Cube" button:

This shows you a preview of your cube and lets you give it a name.

Then hit OK and it takes you straight to your My Cubes gallery where you can see your newly saved cube.

Want to start from scratch? Hit the Reset cube button to start from the beginning with an default cube, and get customizing!

Now you can get creative, make as many cube styles as you like and not worry about losing a style once you have it just the way you like, simply save it in My Cubes.

But what about when you change your phone? No problem, at any time you can back up your cubes onto the SD card from Photo Cube Settings:

Hit the Backup my Cubes button and a few seconds later you are done, your cubes are backed up to the SD card as file called Photo Cube Backup.pcb.

Then when you change phones, either copy over the Photo Cube Backup.pcb file onto the new phones SD card, or simply plug in your original SD card. Hit Restore my Cubes, and shortly after, your My Cubes gallery is exactly as it was!

My Cubes and other new features are available in version 2.0 of Photo Cube.

But wouldn't it be great if you could share the cubes you made with a friend who also has Photo Cube? Stay tuned... ;o)

Photo Cube now supports Honeycomb and ICS!

Well, I'm very happy to announce this maintenance release of Photo Cube version 1.22, which now fully supports Android 3.x and 4.0, Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich respectively.

The main issues were that the Settings with icons were not appearing correctly under these latest versions of Android, turns out that the custom Setting preferences were being hidden by default, so a very simple switch turned them back on.

There was also a few annoying issues where the settings were not being updated correctly when returning from choosing a new image for a cube side. All sorted now.

And voila! Under 3.2, on my Galaxy Tab 7 Plus:

So all good now, Version 1.22 is on the Market as I write this.

On to the long awaited enhancements now!

Spinning madly, out of control...

Well, it has been a while. So busy with my other project, but in testing that out on other phones discovered that Photo Cube still behaves strangely on with regard to the spinning when you swipe left and right.

On the Go Home Launcher and on the Galaxy S2 Touchwiz launcher, things are not quite right when you pan over the far left or far right of the available home screens, it results in the cube still going into a constant spin. On the Desire HD latest update, the cube doesn't do any extra spin at all when you pan left or right.

Turns out this is due to the way different phones interpret the wallpaper offsets and what they end up sending to the Android WallpaperEngine "onOffsetsChanged". In short, I can no longer rely on the scroll position of the current home screen to work out how much extra to spin the cube when panning left and right. HTC latest Sense 3.0 uses a carousel idea which completely ignores that, so you can't pan your wallpaper at all, you are left with a fixed background. That is frankly, stupid, but it is what it is.

So I have changed the extra horizontal spinning of the cube to be completely controlled by the user touch commands. This gives me great control, and has completely done away with occaisonal situations where the cube suddenly freaks out due to odd numbers being sent to "onOffsetsChanged", and has allowed me to control how much it spins and even give it a nice deceleration. I might even turn it into a Setting.

Other upsides, you can now definitely see the "Back" picture a lot more often, this used to be pretty hard to get to appear, because the extra rotation was linked to the home screen. Now it is controlled by the user, so the appearance of the pictures are a lot more random.

Will just do a bit more testing on my friend's S2 to make sure all is well there, then will be off to the Market!

New Version 1.20

New version 1.20 is live on the Android Market now. 

Just two things new in this version, a fix for a very rare bug when choosing a background colour, and a fix for a more common issue on some 3rd party Home Screen launchers, such as the Go Launcher, where changing device orientation would on occasion cause the cube to "freak out", as one user delightfully put it, spinning madly fast until you swiped the screen to stop it.

After some investigation I really cant see why Go Launcher is causing it to freak out to start with, but at least I can treat the symptom and simply stop the mad spin as soon as it is about to start, before the user will notice anything untoward.

In other news, working hard on my next project, it is coming on so well I really wanted to get that out by the end of the year then I can concentrate back on Photo Cube and finally get to all the new features I have been planning. The new Widget really is a thing of beauty... and the top secret killer feature works wonderfully...

Photo Cube Version 1.19 Released

Due to the usual Market incompetency, I had to skip some version numbers. Anyway, version 1.19 is on the Market now. It fixes a couple of minor yet annoying issues, and paves the way for some forthcoming goodness.

Firstly, there was an annoying situation where when you double tap on the Wallpaper to launch the Quick Size and Position screen, it would instead bring up the main Photo Cube Settings screen. That is now fixed, it always brings up the Quick Size and Position.

I added a bit of animation to that screen also, the top and bottom control bars now slide in nicely.

More importantly, there had been a number of reports of users who couldnt get the Background Colour Picker to work because they didnt see how to select the final colour. In some cases that was because it was just a bad design, it uses two coloured rectangles showing the old and new colours, which you had to tap on, which was not obvious. In other cases, it was because in Landscape more, those rectangles didnt appear at all, they were hidden off screen.

So now I changed it to use proper OK and Cancel buttons, and made sure they are visible in both Portrait and Landscape mode:

So what is in Development?

I had a nice request for a screenshot capability and being able to upload the image to Facebook. This is now working, it can capture and share the image to Facebook, WhatsApp, Email, MMS, in fact anything on your phone which handles an image. But I need a better interface to be able to launch the capture, so I want to add more features to the Quick Settings, instead of just having Size and Position I want to add options for Screenshot, Frames, Effects and Rotation, all shown as an overlay above the wallpaper so you can see the changes in real time. Working on that at the moment.

After that: 

• Maybe a new rotation mode, perhaps something more random.
• Then the long awaited Presets enhancement.
• Finally the Album mode, where you choose an album and it will automatically show pictures from that directory with no further action required from the user. A bit of clever cropping and maybe face detection will be required for that.
• The ability to browse a picture in your Gallery or anywhere and then automatically add it to a Photocube side, via a Send To long press command. Very slick..

And of course I am still doing work on the Weather Widget, which is coming on well.. maybe early next year for an initial release.

Photo Cube 1.16 Released

New version finally released. Just a few bug fixes, there was a very annoying issue for some users when the pictures selected didnt cover the entire face of the cubes, just sat in the corner.

I changed the method of selecting and cropping the pictures to that used by the Background Image selector, which is less pretty but a lot more reliable. That seems to have fixed the issue for the users reporting the issue.

I also changed the boring default abstract background to a nice natural scene, a bit more restful on the eyes. 

Then need to do some promo images for launching Photo Cube on the Vodafone App Shop in Europe.

I'm still working hard on the Weather Widget which will be totally unique, literally like nothing else on the market. Watch this space..

Market Issues Sorted..

So I am very happy to say that the Android Market team responded very quickly to my complaint, and a day or two later the search is working correctly again, and a search for "photo cube" now finds my apps.

Sales have unsurprisingly risen once again, almost to pre-July levels, so things are looking up. I know can stop worrying and concentrate on new features for Photo Cube and my top secret next project, which should be, how you say, a doozy. :o)