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!

SD Album working!

So, good news on the SD Album mode, worked out all the difficult stuff. It is now updating very smoothly.

Every time the Wallpaper is hidden, e.g. because you open a new app or switch off the screen, it updates in the background, choosing new random images from the sd album to show, which takes a second or two.

Then as soon as the Wallpaper is shown once more, it immediately updates the pictures. This is istantaneous most of the time, but sometimes there is a brief delay before it switches, only noticeable when the screen is turned on after a long period of inactivity. I should be able to fix this, just by not updating in that situation, only when the phone is "warmed up", so to speak, so the update will then always be instantaneous. What I want is for the user to simply not notice anything is happening, they will just notice that they are seeing new pictures all of the time.

Happy to report also that the automatic cropping I am doing to turn the rectangular images into squares is working very well, there seems no need for any complex Face Detection algorithms. So that will save processing and battery life.

Now just working on removing duplicates and sorting out the interface so it is super easy to choose the SD card album. Something like this:

I think another week should do it, then will be ready. Might also try to fit a few new frame styles into the release.

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!

Share your Cubes!

As promised, here is a feature new in version 2.1, the ability to share your created cubes with other Photo Cube users.

How do you do it? As always, its easy...

You can share your current cube direct from the settings screen, or from your My Cubes gallery.
In the Photo Cube Settings screen, simply scroll down to the Share Cube setting, and tap it.

You first need to type a name for the shared Cube. Type it in and hit OK.

If you are in the My Cubes Gallery, your cubes already have names, so just click on a Cube to show its preview:

Then tap the middle button with the Share icon.

Once you have hit the Share button, you get a choice of Sharing methods like Bluetooth or Email. For best results, use an Email app.

It automatically adds the Cube as an attachment, so just fill in the email of the Photo Cube user you want to send it to, and hit Send!

When the other Photo Cube user receives the email, ask them to download and then open the attachment. They will get a choice of apps to open the cube with, ask them to use My Cubes option:

Then cube is automatically opened and previewed, ready to be imported into their My Cubes gallery and used straight away!



That's all there is to it.

Have fun sharing your favourite creations with your friends and family!

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 Improved Image Quality

So, on to the Photo Cube enhancements. The first requirement was made more obvious when using the larger screen of my tablet, simply put the photos and backgrounds don't look as good as they should.

The reason for this is that a while back, I had to change to a new method of cropping a photo, so that it worked on all devices. The method I used, whilst working far more reliably than the old method, resulted in a cropped image that was not of the highest quality, because the scaling method was not so good. This was particuarly noticeable when using an image smaller than the crop size, which is more likely on backgrounds.

In addition, I was using the same method when scaling the images so that they fit inside the photo frame the user has chosen, leading to obvious artifacts and what appears like crosshatching on same frames.

Had time to look at this now, and figured out a better scaling method which is a little slower, but results in a much higher quality image. The performance hit is only noticeable when changing photos, so the Cube still spins a fluidly as ever, but now the images look far better.

Compare before on the left and the improved version on the right. See the difference in the background quality, and compare the edges of the face of the photo:

And here when a frame is used, again the old on the left and the new on the right, see how the face within the frame had a funny checkered effect on the left image which has now vanished from the improved version on the right:

This means that Photo Cube gets higher quality images with no extra memory used. This will be released next week along with a minor bug fix after I have done a lot of testing to ensure it will work on all devices.

Finally, the Samsung Tab really shows off the quality of some of the frames, for example, I didn't realise how nice the Antique frame style was until I saw it in all its glory on the tablet... love it!

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!