CliMate Animated Weather Widget version 3.3 released!

The new version 3.3 of cliMate is now available!

Featuring:

• New Stonehenge Theme!
• All forecast dates now correctly localized
• Added moon rise and moon set in Main Screen night conditions
• Added option to hide contrails
• Added option to hide Date
• Added choice of windspeed units
• Improved layouts when widget resized to extreme widths
• Bug fixes for rare crashes
• Bug fix for countries that have multiple cities with the same name

 

 

 

So what's next? Already started on a Chinese Ink Painting style theme which looks promising, then I think its about time for a City theme.

 

Also I'm toying with the idea of an alternate forecast view on the main screen, perhaps for the next 12 hours, arranged in a clock style circle, and animated of course. You could then swipe between that detailed forecast for today, and the general forecast for the next 5 days.

 

 

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!

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!

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 Version 1.19 Released

Due to the usual Market incompetency, I had to skip some version numbers. Anyway, version 1.19 is on the Market now. It fixes a couple of minor yet annoying issues, and paves the way for some forthcoming goodness.

Firstly, there was an annoying situation where when you double tap on the Wallpaper to launch the Quick Size and Position screen, it would instead bring up the main Photo Cube Settings screen. That is now fixed, it always brings up the Quick Size and Position.

I added a bit of animation to that screen also, the top and bottom control bars now slide in nicely.

More importantly, there had been a number of reports of users who couldnt get the Background Colour Picker to work because they didnt see how to select the final colour. In some cases that was because it was just a bad design, it uses two coloured rectangles showing the old and new colours, which you had to tap on, which was not obvious. In other cases, it was because in Landscape more, those rectangles didnt appear at all, they were hidden off screen.

So now I changed it to use proper OK and Cancel buttons, and made sure they are visible in both Portrait and Landscape mode:

So what is in Development?

I had a nice request for a screenshot capability and being able to upload the image to Facebook. This is now working, it can capture and share the image to Facebook, WhatsApp, Email, MMS, in fact anything on your phone which handles an image. But I need a better interface to be able to launch the capture, so I want to add more features to the Quick Settings, instead of just having Size and Position I want to add options for Screenshot, Frames, Effects and Rotation, all shown as an overlay above the wallpaper so you can see the changes in real time. Working on that at the moment.

After that: 

• Maybe a new rotation mode, perhaps something more random.
• Then the long awaited Presets enhancement.
• Finally the Album mode, where you choose an album and it will automatically show pictures from that directory with no further action required from the user. A bit of clever cropping and maybe face detection will be required for that.
• The ability to browse a picture in your Gallery or anywhere and then automatically add it to a Photocube side, via a Send To long press command. Very slick..

And of course I am still doing work on the Weather Widget, which is coming on well.. maybe early next year for an initial release.

Version 1.9 ready

Few more tweaks for the quick positioning screen, ready for release tonight.

First off, the Settings app now promotes the new Size and Position feature, I will use this green text area to show all the new features from now on:

Then the Size and Position screen can only be launched from double tapping the wallpaper, not from the recent task list. It now has a more streamlined look:

 As soon as you start dragging the cube, the info panels disappear so you can see the whole screen and the draggable boundaries appear in red. Stop dragging, and the info panels come back.

Start dragging the edges to resize, and once again the info panels are temporarily hidden, so you can more clearly see what you are doing as you resize the cube. Stop dragging, back they come.

Off to the Market with you!

Cube positioning complete(Redux)

Well, I spoke too soon... not quite complete because I realise just a bit more work and I could put resizing in there as well.


So now you double click on the wallpaper to see the overlay, which just shows an appropriately sized green square. Tap inside the square to move the cube around, and the horizontal and vertical indicators appear to help guide you:

And you can resize the cube directly by dragging on the edges of the square.

Works very nicely indeed. All that remains is to make this quick settings screen look nice when in Landscape mode, and also to account for the slight offset in the cube position when not on the centre home screen, I need to line up the square and guidelines correctly.

New features completed...

Thats right folks, done the increased sensitivity on the Vertical Position, Cube Size, Rotation Speed and Tilt, they now go from 0-100 as opposed to 0-10.

Also added the Horizontal Position, and a Slide with Background checkbox which disables it when checked.

Finally added the higher quality backgrounds, which looks very nice on the phone. The background images now are almost 2.25 times bigger. See below, click for larger image.

So just about ready to release a new version. But I had a crazy idea about how to improve the positioning, and even size.. wouldn't it be cool if you could see the home screen in the background as you were playing with the settings? Some sort of translucent screen? Or better yet a button which showed your actual home screen and allowed you to place the cube exactly where you wanted, and maybe even resize using pinch to zoom*. Anyway, we will see how that goes the next few days, and if it is not trivial will add it to the next major release.

* Why is pinch to zoom so called? Because you actually pinch to zoom out, not zoom in. Guess there is no obvious name for the opposite action to pinch..

New features coming..

Will be starting work shortly on some requested features.

First off want to change the granularity of the settings, everything that currently has a range of 0-10 will be changed to 0-100. Naturally any existing settings will be converted proportionally; if you setting was originall 4, it will become 40. That will give users more fine control of sizing, positioning, rotation speed etc.

Next will add feature to position the cube horizontally as well as vertically. Of course, this will interfere with the current horizontal position based on swiping the home screen right and left, so this will have to be an optional setting. Either the position is set manually, or is determined by the current home screen position. This has been requested by some people with tablets, so giving them the extra precision in sizing and positioning should really make the look cube good on a larger screen. For example, it could be shown constantly spinning in the top left corner.

Finally, larger hence better quality background images. Warning, technical info follows... This currently done by OpenGL texture mapping. Under OpenGL ES, all textures have to be powers of 2 in size, so must be 256, 512, 1024, 2048 etc on a side. So currently there is a single 1024*1024 square bitmap that holds all the images, the top 1024*512 holds each 256*256 image for the 6 cube sides (yes with a bit left over!), and the bottom 1024*512 holds the background image. As the aspect ratio for the background is 4:3, this means the maximum background image size that can fit into the bitmap is 683*512. That is just about ok on high res phone screens, but will start to look a bit average on larger screens like tablets when scaled up to the full screen size, particularly in landscape. So the plan is to have an entirely seperate texture for the background, a 1024*1024 block, which will be able to hold a 1024*768 background image, should look a lot better. Just need to check I can allocate the extra memory, and also neatly handle any existing lower res backgrounds. 

Photokube 1.8 released!

Whats new in this one? The new icon for a start, and new promotional graphics:

And to justify a new version, two cool new special effects, Invert Hue and Invert Colour:

Invert Colour gives the classic photographic negative look, whilst Invert Hue swaps the colours round without swapping the brightness or contrast. Gives a cooler temperature look to the photos..