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...
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!
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...
So I am very happy to say that the Android Market team responded very quickly to my complaint, and a day or two later the search is working correctly again, and a search for "photo cube" now finds my apps.
Sales have unsurprisingly risen once again, almost to pre-July levels, so things are looking up. I know can stop worrying and concentrate on new features for Photo Cube and my top secret next project, which should be, how you say, a doozy. :o)
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!
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.
Noticed that I get a lot more sales when Photokube is listed on the front page of LiveWallpapers.org, so am pretty sure that people like it if they actually see it. So going to do a bit of a marketing push.
First thing, need to update the icon. The existing cube with Android logos in different colours is cute, and very Androidy, but doesn't actually indicate what the purpose of the Wallpaper, namely to show your own photos. So the new logo shows some typical usage, a picture of a person, a flower and a balloon to indicate people, nature and landscapes. Hopefully if people see this when scrolling through the market they will be more likely to stop and have a look.
Click for a larger image, the 1st is 512x512 in size for promotional purposes, the others are internal sizes used on the phone itself, corresponding to the various screen sizes out there.
Let me know what you think..
New version is live on the Market now, featuring the new floating panels:
Hope you like it...
