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!

Well, happy to say I treated myself to a Galaxy Tab 7Plus, the 7" update to the original. With a wireless router thrown in, came to a very reasonable 4200HK$.

Not necessarily convinved about Honeycomb, it seems as I guessed before overly complicated, really I didnt see anything wrong with the usability of Android 2.x, it was only the UI which needed an update. Anyway, its all very smooth, and Photo Cube runs very well indeed, smooth as the proverbial silk.

However, it did throw up some issues, the thumbnails of the various settings for pictures, background and effects are not appearing, and it doesnt seem to be correctly notifying that the settings have changed, so you have to choose a picture and then change something else in order for the picture to get displayed. So more work to do there... to make sure even the existing functionality works...

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...