Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Friendly Bugs v1.2

  - New Feature:  Animation smoothing!
  - Update:  5 new butterflies!
  - Update:  "Never" butterfly spawn frequency
  - Bug Fix:  Better preview screen handling

The initial plan here was just to add some more butterflies, so you've got five more arriving at their landing zones now!  At the same time I speed-tested interpolated animation and discovered on a 2.2 device it works with a minimal speed hit.

What's that mean?  Basically, normally we're just playing back animation frames at a regular interval -- this is usually around 15-20fps depending on the item.  If the framerate of the wallpaper is higher than that (and it almost always is), you end up seeing the same animation frame twice in a row.  This means the animation is choppier than it seems like it should be, but the benefit is that the animation is very inexpensive to render.

The interpolation means that instead of this doubling-up behavior, the system will generate additional in-between animation frames as it goes, so your animation is effectively playing back as fast as the framerate allows.  This means smoother butterflies on the screen, basically.  You can't go too far wrong with smoother butterflies, so it's now available as an option in the preferences screen.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Aquarium Live Wallpaper v2.3

  - New Feature: Lionfish!
  - New Feature: Jellyfish!
  - New Feature: Two new toys!
  - Bug Fix: Better Preview screen behavior

Getting the movement on the Jellyfish to look reasonable took a little while, and I still get the feeling some tweaking is going to happen, but it looks pretty good overall!  By popular demand there's a lionfish in place now too!

The two new toys are a ship anchor and a old-style diving helmet, which feel pretty appropriate to me.  The new art was done by Allyson Vaughn!

Monday, January 24, 2011

Blue Skies Live Wallpaper v1.3

  - New Feature: UFO sightings
  - Bug Fix: Better Preview screen behavior
  - Bug Fix: No more wispy cloud popping

Strangely we've had a number of requests for this one.  You can now enable UFO sightings in the settings screen.  These can either be random, or can appear when your battery is running low -- they'll start at the 20% mark.  Silly but fun!

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Hearts Live Wallpaper v1.05

  - New Feature: Hearts with your own picture in them!

The new version of hearts allows you to enable 'Locket' hearts.  These are hearts with a photo inside them, similar to a traditional locket.  Browse for your favorite picture of a loved one!

It should detect the format of the image you selected and properly adjust the scaling and everything, but even so you'll want to make sure your selected image has the subject reasonably centered to work properly.  It's tuned to handle 16x9, 4x3, 3x4, and 9x16 properly, which are the common cell-phone photo ratios as far as I can tell.

Let me know what you think!

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Thunderstorm Live Wallpaper v1.4

  - New Feature: Lightning strikes where you touched
  - Update: New cloud art
  - Update: How To activity

 Sweet, you can now have summoned lightning actually strike your finger!  It was randomly placed before, and you can go back to that by unchecking a box in the settings if you prefer.  This update also includes updated cloud art with a little more range to it, hopefully everybody approves!

The How To activity is the little popup box that explains how to use a live wallpaper, Thunderstorm was the only one that didn't have this implemented, so it's finally in place now, helping to reduce confusion!

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

To Do List

Some of these are done already, but I'm hoping to introduce proper filtering with the next round of updates, and am waiting for Samsung to finish updating more of their Galaxy S phones to 2.2.  If this goes on too long I'll just go ahead and push new updates out.

Crossed out stuff is done!

  - Hearts: Additional styles of touch hearts, allow you to specify a custom image?
  - Aquarium: Jellyfish, more fish varieties (Lionfish!)
  - Clouds: UFO sightings! (Behavior & ArtShow up when battery is low!
  - Flames: Add (optional) smoke
  - Friendly Bugs: More butterflies, 'never' butterfly frequency
  - Thunderstorm: Lightning lines up with where you tap

Monday, January 10, 2011

Jungle Waterfall Live Wallpaper v1.1

  - Update: Reduced overhang
  - Bug Fix: Better preview screen behavior

I periodically get feedback that the cliff overhang is too big when you've got the camera all the way to the left, so it's been shrunken down and lets you see more of the temple now.  :)

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Bamboo Forest v1.15

  - New Feature: Setting for wisp color
  - Bug Fix: Better preview screen handling

This is primarily a maintenance update to get the live_wallpaper flag added, as mentioned below.  I worked in a couple other updates at the same time, so you can modify the color of the floaty particles if you'd like now.  :)

Friday, January 7, 2011

Asteroid Belt v1.25

  - New Feature: Control color of orbital rings!
  - Update: Less memory usage
  - Update: Added "live wallpaper" flag
  - Bugfix: Preview screen no longer jumps to far left

Now that 2.2 is being pushed to a bunch of Galaxy S phones, we're hopefully at the end of a long messy road of phones that don't properly display live wallpapers in the market.  I'm told this has been added to the standard test suite so it'll red-flag if people don't have it configured properly in the future.  To that end I'll be updating all the wallpapers over the next week or so to add this flag, which should finally help fix a lot of long-standing confusion within the Marketplace.

A few wallpapers pretty much have all the logical features I can think of, but most of them will be getting an addition or two as I go through and add this flag -- it's no fun getting an update that doesn't add anything, I know!

In the case of Asteroid Belt, I notched down memory usage a bit by converting the specular maps to grey scale, fixed the behavior of the preview screen, and added a setting to control the color of the orbit rings, if you're so inclined.  Nothing earth-shaking but it can't hurt.  :)

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Hearts v1.0a

  - Bugfix: White squares on some handsets

Fixed! This was due to the compressed filesize of the ornate hearts texture being too large.  It's fixed now and should use less memory besides.  Sorry about that folks!