Now operating as Dusk Jockeys Digital Solutions

After 27 years as a software engineeer and programmer, I am rebranding and relaunching Dusk Jockeys Android Apps as Dusk Jockeys Digital Solutions, and commencing operations as an independent software contractor based in Hong Kong. 

Contact me on jpbwebster@gmail.com/duskjockeys@gmail.com for any C#/.NET software needs, particularly in the fields of UI, algorithms, or project management. 

In addition, I am creating and promoting products based on digital art, specifically phone cases, mugs, t-shirts and and drinks coasters on Zazzle, Tostadora and Spreadshirt. Feel free to contact me for any custom designs. 

New Version 3.7.2 of CliMate Animated Weather Widget released

The new version 3.7.2 was released today.

This fixes the Current Location issue on some devices, by allowing Google Play Services to be used to get the location. There is a new Use Google Play Services checkbox in the Set Location settings screen.

This will be automatically ticked for Android 6.0+ devices, but you can change that at any time. If its not ticked, it uses the old method of getting the location, which is fine for the vast majority of devices.  Just tick the box if you are having trouble getting the location.

Now I will go back to the Pirate Theme, and see if I can speed that up.

More pirates...

Work continues on the Pirate Theme... here is the scene for the Partly Cloudy Sunset weather condition:

 

So what's new? First off the foreground is finished, and tweaked so that the forecast animations are clearly visible in front of the table and its contents.

 

Then there is a brand new lantern style on the top left, and at night and sunset times it has a flickering candle, which in turns cast a flickering light on the left corner of the cabin. And of course the lantern still swings as the ship pitches and rolls.

 

In the sea, the pirate ship in the distance now has a smoothly animated wake, matching the white tops colour of the current sea.

 

I can't do a great deal more with the animations, there is already so much going on and so many layers required to create these special effects that its pushing even my trusty Samsung S5.

 

I may consider an island in the distance, but that was pretty hard to get looking nice at first so I temporarily abandoned it.

 

Anyway, still enjoying this, and probably the best looking and most dramatic widget theme yet.

 

 



More Pirates..

Avast! Work going well on the pirate theme. Changed the map around and added a chest, coins, a goblet, a pirate hat (tricorn) and a different porthole style.

Here is the widget in full size, in Weather Only mode so you can see the full background image..

Here it is in the main screen, with weather details and forecast..

 

 

Pirate style

Ideas are coming on well for the Pirate Theme:

New version 3.7 released!

So the new version 3.7 of cliMate Animated Weather Widget was released on Monday 29th.

What's new?

First fixed a problem with the fonts on the forecast part of the widget, this only occurred when using Next 3D Launcher, due to a bug in that launcher. I finally developed a work around, and the fonts are perfect now.

 

Then there were a few issues when using the Weather Only setting, the idea here being that no text at all is shown. There were two problems, the Refreshing icon was still showing, and the there was a grey background in the forecast area showing for some weather conditions, as it was expecting to use that to make the forecast details show up better. As there is no need for either of those during Weather Only, they are now hidden.

 

The Font on the wind speed units was not scaling correctly to the screen size, that is now fixed.

Then I improved the Rain Shower and and Snow Shower forecast thumbnails, made the falling rain and snow bigger and easier to see, and the sun and clouds more clear.

And finally, there is a brand new Town House theme. This is actually based on the view from my parent's house in England. It features the usual weather conditions, birds and plane in the background, but in the foreground we have an Audi driving up the driveway, cars driving past on the High Street in the distance, and the flag of your current country waving from the top of the tower behind the trees. The cars have headlights at night. Finally, there is a little solar powered flower toy that moves its leaves based on the amount of sunlight available.

This theme was a labour of love and originally just going to be for my parents and nieces, but I decided to share it with everyone as its a lot of fun!

 

 

So now started work on something completely different, a pirate theme!

 

This simulates the view from a porthole on a pirate ship. The whole view outside the window moves and rotates as if the ship is moving in the sea, looks super realistic. There will be islands and ships moving past, seagulls, maybe dolphins or sharks or a whale, and inside the cabin will be lots of piratical stuff, like chests of gold, treasure maps and cutlasses. The below is a sneak peak of a proof of concept to see how the movement worked. Will start in earnest on that next week.

More Chinese Theme..

Been doing more work on the Chinese Painting theme showing a misty mountain lake, see below:

First off, blending the edges so they fade into white, to give more of a paper or canvas feel.
Then added a bridge and gatehouse in the foreground, with a new animation of a galloping horse and rider that runs across the curve of the bridge.

The fishing boat now drifts slowly behind the bridge.

The waterfall animation is improved at larger resolutions, and the flying birds are faded out a bit so that they don't appear so high contrast.

The tree branches on the right still wave in the breeze, and drop flower petals at random intervals.

The pink water lilies at the front drift across the lake.

Still to do:

• Improve the lily animation and add more flowers to the lake foreground.
• Redo the far mountains behind the temple

Then will start work on the weather animations, and changing the colours of the forecast thumbnails so that they work with the white background.

I have decided to keep this a more stylized theme based on a single painting which is set during the day, so there will be no sunset or night versions. That will also mean its quicker to finish!

After that I need to investigate a city theme, but I had a nice idea for a African Savannah theme, with Kilimanjaro rising in the background, waving yellow grasses in the foreground, some nice baobab trees that would look great in silhouette at night and during sunset, and of course some nice animated animals, perhaps giraffes. And maybe a landrover crossing the screen..

New Chinese Painting Theme sneak peak..

So I have been working on a new theme, and here is a sneak peak; the concept is an animated painting of a misty mountain lake in Japan or China. It is based on Chinese ink paintings, so its quite monotone, with just splashes of colour.

Still work in progress, but has some nice and different animations. I have included a waterfall for the first time, which I am very happy with; I am sure that will be reused in themes to come. Then there is a fishing boat that drifts out of the mist, the usual flying birds, some floating water lilies, and flower petals that drop from the waving tree branches. And as there is a lake, it shows water ripples as the raindrops splash down during rain scenes.

All the usual Weather conditions will be present, but maybe a bit more stylized than the other themes. I haven't decided yet whether to include sunset and night variations, or just stick with the idea of an animated painting.

And I cant quite decide whether it should be Chinese or Japanese, the gate type structure is only found in Japan, but the mountains and the temple in the background are more Chinese. So I'm also toying with the idea of replacing that with a bridge of some kind, maybe joining the left and right sides.

Anyway, here is a quick screenshot:

cliMate v3.4 Released

This was a quick release to fix a long standing issue since 3.0 that I finally got a handle on, as I was getting several reports of the Current Location not working, which just didn't make sense. If the phone returns a set of GPS coordinates, then the weather providers should always return data for the nearest weather station, but this was failing, even though the coordinates had been obtained.

With the help of one user, we narrowed it down to World Weather Online, and to when running under Czech language, at which point I could replicate and fix it.

It turns out that many languages use the comma character ',' to indicate a decimal point, instead of the period character '.' which is used in the UK, US etc. When the phone was running under such a language, it was returning the GPS coordinates using a comma, so -13.48123 became -13,48123. Open Weather Map is able to handle both commas and periods for decimal points, but World Weather Online was always expecting a period, so it was failing and returning error messages.

This is now fixed, and v3.4 should now have the Current Location working fine under all different locales and languages for all Weather Providers.

Version 3.3 nearing release..

So I have been hard at work on the next version of cliMate, with a lot of minor bug fixes but several notable improvements.

First off, a brand new Stonehenge theme for the widget, which looks really dramatic and striking:

 

 

 

Then a new Moonset and Moonrise animation and time indicator on the main screen, which is shown instead of the sunrise and sunset animation during night time scenes:

 

 



 

Then a whole bunch of small fixes for things:

• Ensuring the dates on the forecast are shown using the correct local settings, e.g. 5/26 in the US versus 26/5 in Europe
• Fixing the layouts when the widget is stretched extremely wide
• A range of crash fixes
• Fixes for forecasts where the Chance of Storm condition was used instead of Thunderstorm
• Improved animation on Thunderstorm forecast animation
• Added the ability to hide today's date
• Added the ability to hide the jet contrails on the Clear and Partly Cloudy conditions

I had the occasional report that the clock shown on the widget is not syncing up with the phone's actual time, but until now I have not been quite sure how to deal with it. So also trialing a new method of determining when the screen is switched on and hence when to update the clock.

 

A lot of testing to go, and then should aim to release maybe next week.

cliMate Animated Weather Widget v3.0 Released!

cliMate Animated Weather Widget version 3.0 was released today, and features the following enhancements:
 

• New default World Weather Online weather provider
• Improved main screen that matches Widget theme
• New sunrise/sunset information on main screen
• Windmill rotation matches current windspeed in main screen
• Improved animation on main screen when swiping between different locations

 After the upgrade, any existing widgets will remain using Open Weather Map until they are manually switched over to use World Weather Online, which can easily be done by clicking on the Set Location within the Settings screen, then clicking on the Preferred Weather Data setting to choose the World Weather Online provider:

 

It will then search for the original city name or current location via World Weather Online.

All new widgets will use World Weather Online from the start, unless told otherwise.

This should fix the 2nd of the two major complaints about cliMate, firstly that is wasn't resizable, secondly that the data wasn't accurate.

World Weather Online seems just as good (if not better) than AccuWeather, so hopefully the accuracy issue will be laid to rest.

Next up: Adding a moon rise/moon set indicator, and the Stonehenge theme.

Then, working on new themes, all suggestions welcome!

CliMate Update - New Main Screen and Weather Provider

Time for an update on recent work to CliMate.

On the main screen:
 

• The layout for a particular widget location is now much improved and linked to the chosen Theme for that widget.
• If the Countryside Theme is chosen, the windmill rotation is based on the current wind speed
• There is a new sunrise/sunset animation; the sun rises over the sunrise time indicator, travels across the "sky" and sets above the sunset time indicator. 

Also started to add a new weather provider. The accuracy of OpenWeatherMap varies enormously according to location; for some areas it is perfect, others have severe problems with accuracy. For other locations, the accuracy depends on the time of year; here in Hong Kong for example its fine throughout the year apart from about 3 months around April, where it is not able to keep up with the constant shifting of fine weather to rainy weather.

Everyone wants AccuWeather, but they are no longer giving out API keys; so I can't get free or paid data for it.

The next best option seems World Weather Online; based on my tests so far it is more accurate and up to date than OpenWeatherMap, but of course is not free. So I will be rolling that out with the next release and hoping that will resolve most users accuracy issues.

Weather Widget getting close to finishing..

Finally finished all the weather conditions for both Portrait and Landscape mode, in all three themes; Countryside, Skyscape and Black Glass.

The main screen with the forecast is now done, with lots of beautiful animations:

The final step is a screen to pick your location for the weather, then lots of testing and debugging. I am hoping another month or so.

Work progressing well on the Weather Widget with its secret sauce..

Now added wind speed and humidity metrics, with adjustable appearance based on how windy it is.

Had a few issues recently with the widget freezing and failing to update the clock, trying to get to the bottom of that now.

Also started new Skyscape style, for those who dont want to see the countryside but just concentrate on the weather itself.

Weather Redux..

So finally happy to report I found a free weather provider, OpenWeatherMap.org, so I have at last got the new in-development Weather Widget working and starting to iron out the bugs and make all the settings user definable. .

Here is a nice detailed shot. Note that New York is showing temperatures in Fahrenheit, Bangkok in Celsius. There are different clock types, and the time and date can be switched on and off.

 

Other features... on the night scene, note the drifting clouds, the correct phase of the moon, the shooting stars, the spinning windmill, and the flying birds. The bush to the right slowly waves back and forth.

On the Cloud day scene, we again have nice moving cloud layers, flying birds, a spinning windmill, bush gently waving in the breeze, and a plane towing a user defined message through the clouds.

A lot more to do to pretty up the user interface for the settings and make it foolproof, particularly the selection of weather location. Then I need to work out the correct sunrise and sunset time so that scene style can be automatically shown, and then also work out the local time zone for that location.

It just shows the current weather only, so perhaps that is enough for the first release, or maybe will need to add a forecast screen also.

Anyway, good news, happy to report it is all working well so far..

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.

Even more SD albums...

More good work completed on the SD Album mode.

Mostly working on robustness, so that it elegantly handles unavailability of the SD card. When that happens, obviously it cannot choose new pictures, because the album is not available, so it instead uses keeps the last ones shown until the SD card is available once more.

This means that when you restart your phone, or any other operation that would normal leave the SD unavailable briefly, the cube is still showing nice images.

When it is choosing images, it is now clever enough to avoid duplicates, so you wont get the same images on more than 1 side. That holds of course only if you have at least 6 items in your album, if less than that, obviously it will have to show duplicates.

As well as avoiding duplicates, it also tries to avoid using the same pictures as last time, so you always get a completely new set. That relies on there being at least 12 items in the album.

SD Cubes are now marked as such in the My Cubes gallery, showing a little SD card icon. That paves the way for showing Facebook, Picasa icons etc when I get round to allowing those types of Album in Photocube.

Last thing to work on: elegantly handle when the SD album for a cube has been completely deleted, as obviously that cube can never work any more.

Then lots and lots of testing!!! Looking at a release next week.. :o)

More SD Album...

More work completed on SD Album mode.

Duplicate images now removed, unless your album has less than 6 images, in which case naturally the some of the cube sides will need to show the same pictures.

Here is the final look of the Picture settings, when choosing an Album:

Tonight working on saving your SD Album cube to My Cubes, and gracefully handling the removal of SD cards; I need to cache the last pictures and use those when the SD card is temporarily unavailable due to removal, in use or the phone is restarting.

Finally, I just wanted to show off another feature which is already published but you may not use so much, the Background settings. It is very easy to apply some effects to your chosen background; the blur effect keeps the background recognizable but makes the cube standout more, and the tint lets you apply an overall colour. And of course you can see immediately what it will look like in the preview image.

Get creative, its easy to make some vintage or Instagram type looks!