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.

Bug fix release 1.10

Discovered several annoying bugs regarding the quick Size and Position screen.


Firstly if you haven't loaded that quick settings screen for a while, it sometimes can take a few seconds to come up after you have double tapped the screen. Hence added a "Loading..." splash screen, to indicate that it has registered your double tap and is on the way. This disappears once the screen is loaded. This should help confusion whether your double tap was effective or not, if you see the loading screen, it was effective. 


Secondly, quite a few bugs surrounding the double tap event itself. If you tap and slide the screen multiple times to change home screen, that could be interpreted as a double tap, which of course we don't want. Also, if your second tap happens to be upon an icon, this will launch that app, so I have to ensure that the second tap doesn't also launch the translucent settings app on top of that newly launched app. I think I got most of them, but there may be another lurking there. 


I wanted to get a new version out though to fix the most annoying sliding screen bug, so 1.10 is on the market as I write this.

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.

Cube positioning complete!

So, the last idea was the best. Activate the transparent Positioning screen on double tapping the wallpaper itself. Then you are guaranteed to always have the wallpaper in the background, so you can see the widgets.

Also added some guideline crosshairs, so you can see exactly where you are putting it, which helps when the cube is rotating; it is not always easy to see where the centre is. (Also, when you double tap from the Live Wallpaper picker, the cube is shown in the background but no longer updating, I unfortunately have no control over that. So at least the guidelines can help you work in that unusual situation. Ideally I would disable the double tap enitrely in that situation.)

So here it is:

I will still leave the existing settings in there for fine tuning, but maybe put a note in the Settings screen of how to access the Positioning. Bit more testing, and then to the Market for version 1.9!

However (and as usual!) doing this has given me another idea. If I double tap to enable quick positioning, why not double tap to launch a generic Quick Settings screen, with not just Positioning, but access to Effects, Frames, Size etc from different tabs overlaid on the transparent window.

So you could see your cube spinning, hit the different Effect from thumbnails say down the side or along the bottom, and see the cube change immediately. That is probably for a later version though, a bit more work, but definitely do-able.

Update: Added new borders to show the valid draggable area for the cube as below. Just one more bug to fix, then ready.