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...

Sneak Peaks

Some more sneak peaks of the next Dusk Jockeys App, my Weather with a twist of secret sauce... totally unique on the Android Market.

Photo Cube Live Wallpaper version 3.0 released!

Very happy to report that version 3.0 of Photo Cube Live Wallpaper was released yesterday.

That has the motion detection stuff I have been working for the past week or two, and a range of bug fixes for the various issues introduced during the Album mode release.

You can now shake to bounce the cube around the screen, and adjust the bouncing speed via the Settings. It has full 3d motion detection, it bounces off the sides, and also the "front" and "back" of the screen. I just added a little vibrate to the bounce event, will put that in the next version, its very cool and really makes the bounce seem real!

When in Album mode, you can shake the device a few times to trigger the picture refresh, the cube shrinks into the screen, and then zooms back out with the new pictures all ready.

Finally there is an experimental Background Depth feature, which when switched on moves the background image left and right as you tilt the phone sideway, as if the background is being shown a few cm "behind" the screen as opposed to on the screen. Its not perfect yet, but is still fun to play with.

I am off on holiday to England for a week tomorrow, so will not be working much on it, but will keep an eye out for any bug reports so I can fix any issues which arise. As much as I try, it is hard to find everything when I only have a few devices to test on.

Now I have to take a break and think about new development. Improving the Background Depth feature, maybe doing a nicer Motion Detection settings screen with live previews. And of course back to my long delayed project, the Weather Widget with top secret killer feature. :o)

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!

Shaken not stirred..

Work on the Motion Detection continues at a good rate.

I have completed the Shake to Refresh for Album mode. When a shake is detected, the cube and floating panels quickly shrink into the screen, and then swiftly restore back to their original size with the newly refreshed pictures. The time for this operation will depend on the speed of the phone, but is usually less than a second. Looks very cool!

Jerking the phone left or right now gives the cube a bit of extra spin in that direction. That took a good bit of working out, particularly because the direction depends of course on how the phone is held, working out which way is really "right" or "left" can vary enormously, particuarly on newer devices like tablets, which can have 4 distinct orientations, not just landscape and portrait.

Today got the maths working for the 3D background effect, the phone now seems like a window on the background, tilting it left or right shows the background from another angle, as if you were walking past a window and looking out, the view through the window would change. A very subtle, cool effect, but I need to make it super smooth, its still a bit jerky. I think a day or two more for that.

Then need to extend the jerking effect to give the cube a bounce off the "walls" of the phone.

All this new Motion Detection stuff will be in a major new 3.0 release. I want to do a nice Settings screen, with nice previews of the effects.

Last night I did a quick bug fix release 2.5, to fix a few issues that had come up from Album mode, mostly from when users had only a single picture in an SD card album.

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.