Name Change..

Well, it seems that I was not alone in seeing a drop in sales. Around 4th July weekend, my sales suddenly tanked. From 12-15 a day and a high of 19 on one day, it just dropped to 3 or 4 a day.

I just assumed it was a summer slump, or because of the holiday. Didn't seem like I could do much about it, so I concentrated on adding new features, trying to make it better and working on other apps.

Then I finally found this:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Android+Market/thread?tid=1e575cf9e437736c&hl=en

So everyone else is having the same problem, all from around the same time.

And it seems to be tied into Search Terms. In my case, if people are looking for a cube that shows photos or pictures, they are most likely to search for "photo cube". Despite me having that exact text in my description, searching for "photo cube" doesn't bring up my app.

Searching for "photocube", "photo kube" and "photokube" are all fine, and return my app in the listing, but they are all less likely than the simple "photo cube" which doesn't work. So I think what happened is that Google changed the Search algorithm at the start of July, and my app suffered. Everyone else is reporting the same problems. In many cases even searching for the exact name of their app is failing to return results. There is also a significant difference between searching on the Market App and on the Market web portal.

Frankly, the Google Market is laughably poor, and breaks at the slightest opportunity, with little redress for developers. Almost every bug report or comment is ignored or answered with standardised replies that don't respond to the issue concerned.

Just this morning, my app ratings have been halved in the Market, I went from 22 to 10 for no apparent reason. That is just completely shit.

So in an attempt to resolve my search issue I have renamed to Photo Cube Live Wallpaper. This now at least returns my app when I search for "photo cube" on the Market Web, but still returns nothing on the Market App on my phone.

So will see what happens over the next few days.

Google Market, not impressed! 2/10, must try harder!

New Version 1.14

Thanks to a kind customer who emailed me I was able to fix a very annoying yet rare bug, and uploaded version 1.14 last night.

When running Photokube the code draws the background with the OpenGL command glDrawTexiOES, then draws the cube and panels. However on the Android emulator on my pc, the background has always been displayed in front, obscuring the cube and the floating panels, despite me asking it to be drawn behind the kube.

Since it has always appeared correctly on all the phones I have tested, I assumed that it was some sort of bug with the emulator and Open GL. As no one mentioned the problem in the market, and after searching for similar issues on Google I found a few similar complaints about the emulator I came to the conclusion that it was the emulator at fault.

However, Tim emailed me to let me know he had been having the same issue on his phone, so I was forced to revisit it. Thinking about it again, it was really pretty unlikely that if it was an emulator issue, I would only have found a few references to it, it would have been a known issue.

Anyway, more Googling of glDrawTexiOES and z-order depth brought up quite a few people having issues in general, so I was able to narrow it down to Depth Testing in OpenGL, specifically the GL_DEPTH_TEST.

Previously I had depth testing enabled all the time, which seemed sensible, but what seems to fix the issue on the emulator and also work on phones is disabling Depth Testing when drawing the background, then immediately enabling it again before I draw the cube and panels. This doesn't seem logical to me to be honest, I can see why it is needed for drawing the cube, so the panels appear behind the cube, but I don't see why leaving it enabled also doesn't work for the background. Still, now it works for Tim and hopefully any others who had similar issues.

I don't really have the time at the moment but if I get the chance I will research it in more detail so I can really understand why it behaves this way.

Anyway, hope that solves the issue for anyone else. New version on the Market now.

Back from Blighty...

So finished my holiday.. had a nice time in England.

While I was away I released 1.10 and 1.11, to fix some issues with the quick Size and Position screen. Also optimised the memory of the textures used to take advantage of the fact that the Background image is now stored in its own texture, usefully saving 512k memory at runtime.

Just discovered another bug, if you triple tap on the wallpaper then you get the Size and Position screen correctly but the Loading message doesnt get removed, need to fix that. Triple tapping is not that common in general, but if you are playing around with the floating panels, tapping them to make them disappear, it can come up pretty regularly. So will fix that soon, then concentrate a little on another project before starting work on the Album mode and Presets.

Bug fix release 1.10

Discovered several annoying bugs regarding the quick Size and Position screen.


Firstly if you haven't loaded that quick settings screen for a while, it sometimes can take a few seconds to come up after you have double tapped the screen. Hence added a "Loading..." splash screen, to indicate that it has registered your double tap and is on the way. This disappears once the screen is loaded. This should help confusion whether your double tap was effective or not, if you see the loading screen, it was effective. 


Secondly, quite a few bugs surrounding the double tap event itself. If you tap and slide the screen multiple times to change home screen, that could be interpreted as a double tap, which of course we don't want. Also, if your second tap happens to be upon an icon, this will launch that app, so I have to ensure that the second tap doesn't also launch the translucent settings app on top of that newly launched app. I think I got most of them, but there may be another lurking there. 


I wanted to get a new version out though to fix the most annoying sliding screen bug, so 1.10 is on the market as I write this.

Photokube 1.9 released!

1.9 is live on the Market!

New features:

Horizontal Positioning
Finer control of Positioning, Size, Rotation Speed and Tilt/Wobble. New range is 0-100.
2.5 times the size of background images, much higher quality.
New quick Size and Position screen, launched from double tapping the Wallpaper.
Quick links to this site and to email Dusk Jockeys.


What's next? Well, a holiday back to England for a week, so not much. After that, here are the next set of planned improvements. The aim is to make this Wallpaper as easy to use as possible.

• Presets: Save your entire current settings as a preset, so you can have quick access to multiple looks. Maybe even make some default layouts, if the image licensing can be sorted out.
• More Quick Settings: Want to add Rotation, Special Effect, Frame Style, Floating Panel count to the double tap settings overlay screen. Wouldn't it be nice to click on the Vintage button and see the cube immediately change colour?
• Shake/Bounce effect. Thanks to David for this idea, if you shake the phone it would be nice if the cube bounced around the screen before coming back to rest in your selected position.
• Movement: As an alternative to the above, actually have it auomatically bounce around the edges of the screen.
• Gallery mode: Choose an album folder on your sd card, and the cube will display random photos from that album each time it is visible. Potential issues with cropping, but would be ideal for first time users.
• Mini-game: Click on the panels to hide them, if you click them all within a certain length of time, the cube rewards you with a little dance or super spin, bounce or something.

Anyway, hope you like the new version. As always, email for comments, questions or help.

Version 1.9 ready

Few more tweaks for the quick positioning screen, ready for release tonight.

First off, the Settings app now promotes the new Size and Position feature, I will use this green text area to show all the new features from now on:

Then the Size and Position screen can only be launched from double tapping the wallpaper, not from the recent task list. It now has a more streamlined look:

 As soon as you start dragging the cube, the info panels disappear so you can see the whole screen and the draggable boundaries appear in red. Stop dragging, and the info panels come back.

Start dragging the edges to resize, and once again the info panels are temporarily hidden, so you can more clearly see what you are doing as you resize the cube. Stop dragging, back they come.

Off to the Market with you!

Cube positioning complete(Redux)

Well, I spoke too soon... not quite complete because I realise just a bit more work and I could put resizing in there as well.


So now you double click on the wallpaper to see the overlay, which just shows an appropriately sized green square. Tap inside the square to move the cube around, and the horizontal and vertical indicators appear to help guide you:

And you can resize the cube directly by dragging on the edges of the square.

Works very nicely indeed. All that remains is to make this quick settings screen look nice when in Landscape mode, and also to account for the slight offset in the cube position when not on the centre home screen, I need to line up the square and guidelines correctly.

Cube positioning complete!

So, the last idea was the best. Activate the transparent Positioning screen on double tapping the wallpaper itself. Then you are guaranteed to always have the wallpaper in the background, so you can see the widgets.

Also added some guideline crosshairs, so you can see exactly where you are putting it, which helps when the cube is rotating; it is not always easy to see where the centre is. (Also, when you double tap from the Live Wallpaper picker, the cube is shown in the background but no longer updating, I unfortunately have no control over that. So at least the guidelines can help you work in that unusual situation. Ideally I would disable the double tap enitrely in that situation.)

So here it is:

I will still leave the existing settings in there for fine tuning, but maybe put a note in the Settings screen of how to access the Positioning. Bit more testing, and then to the Market for version 1.9!

However (and as usual!) doing this has given me another idea. If I double tap to enable quick positioning, why not double tap to launch a generic Quick Settings screen, with not just Positioning, but access to Effects, Frames, Size etc from different tabs overlaid on the transparent window.

So you could see your cube spinning, hit the different Effect from thumbnails say down the side or along the bottom, and see the cube change immediately. That is probably for a later version though, a bit more work, but definitely do-able.

Update: Added new borders to show the valid draggable area for the cube as below. Just one more bug to fix, then ready.

More work on cube positioning..

Well I got it working, but there are issues.

So here we have a screenshot of the Positioning screen, which is launched from a regular Setting button in the Photokube Settings app.

When this is clicked, I close the main Settings app, and bring up this special transparent window with overlays for Title and the Checkbox at the bottom. That shows through the actual homescreen, with the existing cube wallpaper. 

Then any clicks or drags on this screen are translated appropriately and passed through to the Settings as if the user had manually made changes to the horizontal and vertical settings themselves, and the wallpaper cube in the background immediately responds.

Works a treat, as if you are dragging the cube yourself, and you can accurately position the cube to fit around or next to other widgets on the screen.

However..  whatever you happen to be looking at when you launch the Settings app will be what you see behind the transparent Positioning window. If you launch it from the homescreen, then great, you see the wallpaper, and the cube. If you launch it from anywhere else, e.g. the app tray, then you see what that as the background instead, which is not that useful.

So I ideally I need to somehow replicate what the Live Wallpaper picker does, and get an image of the real homescreen onto which I can then overlay my own cube. That is better because it shows the actual other widgets on the screen.

Failing that, I guess re-create the Photocube background and show the spinning cube in its entirety within my positioning window. Still will work ok for control, but the user wont be able to see the rest of the homescreen widgets, so will be more trial and error if they are trying to position the cube in relation to a widget, e.g. in the top right corner.

Another idea would be to launch the positioning window directly from the homescreen, via a double click or something. Then I would know it would always be visible through the transparent window... Hmmmm. That sounds like the best approach maybe..

New features completed...

Thats right folks, done the increased sensitivity on the Vertical Position, Cube Size, Rotation Speed and Tilt, they now go from 0-100 as opposed to 0-10.

Also added the Horizontal Position, and a Slide with Background checkbox which disables it when checked.

Finally added the higher quality backgrounds, which looks very nice on the phone. The background images now are almost 2.25 times bigger. See below, click for larger image.

So just about ready to release a new version. But I had a crazy idea about how to improve the positioning, and even size.. wouldn't it be cool if you could see the home screen in the background as you were playing with the settings? Some sort of translucent screen? Or better yet a button which showed your actual home screen and allowed you to place the cube exactly where you wanted, and maybe even resize using pinch to zoom*. Anyway, we will see how that goes the next few days, and if it is not trivial will add it to the next major release.

* Why is pinch to zoom so called? Because you actually pinch to zoom out, not zoom in. Guess there is no obvious name for the opposite action to pinch..

New features coming..

Will be starting work shortly on some requested features.

First off want to change the granularity of the settings, everything that currently has a range of 0-10 will be changed to 0-100. Naturally any existing settings will be converted proportionally; if you setting was originall 4, it will become 40. That will give users more fine control of sizing, positioning, rotation speed etc.

Next will add feature to position the cube horizontally as well as vertically. Of course, this will interfere with the current horizontal position based on swiping the home screen right and left, so this will have to be an optional setting. Either the position is set manually, or is determined by the current home screen position. This has been requested by some people with tablets, so giving them the extra precision in sizing and positioning should really make the look cube good on a larger screen. For example, it could be shown constantly spinning in the top left corner.

Finally, larger hence better quality background images. Warning, technical info follows... This currently done by OpenGL texture mapping. Under OpenGL ES, all textures have to be powers of 2 in size, so must be 256, 512, 1024, 2048 etc on a side. So currently there is a single 1024*1024 square bitmap that holds all the images, the top 1024*512 holds each 256*256 image for the 6 cube sides (yes with a bit left over!), and the bottom 1024*512 holds the background image. As the aspect ratio for the background is 4:3, this means the maximum background image size that can fit into the bitmap is 683*512. That is just about ok on high res phone screens, but will start to look a bit average on larger screens like tablets when scaled up to the full screen size, particularly in landscape. So the plan is to have an entirely seperate texture for the background, a 1024*1024 block, which will be able to hold a 1024*768 background image, should look a lot better. Just need to check I can allocate the extra memory, and also neatly handle any existing lower res backgrounds.