Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Jumpgate Live Wallpaper v1.05

  - New Feature: Multiple Characters!  Android, Spaceship, None
  - Update: Added a bit of rolling motion to flight
  - Update: 'Pixelated' style energy
  - Bug Fix: 'Flight Speed' no longer ranges from 'dim' to 'bright'

Lots of folks wanted something other than Jetpack Android, so that's the main focus of this update. You can switch him out for a pretty sweet spacecraft, or turn off the character entirely if you'd like.  I added some rolling to the flight motion on the spaceship, and it looked nice so added a bit to Android as well.

People have really dug this wallpaper so far, hopefully we can build in a few more fun features to make it even cooler!

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Using standard ADB drivers for other phones

Not too exciting for most folks, but I figured I'd mention I've actually been maintaining this old post.  It's mostly for my own convenience, but if you're looking for an .inf string for a Droid 2, Nexus S, G2, Incredible, or EVO there's one in there.

Back from MWC11

Spent the last week or so at Mobile World Congress -- we were invited to show our stuff at the Google Android booth and figured it'd be cool to take advantage!  Aside from lots of hurting feet, I had a chance to talk to a lot of interesting folks, see some interesting upcoming products, and made some promising business contacts.

Now that I'm back it's time to work on the next round of projects.  Jumpgate's done really well so far and folks seem to like it a lot!  I'm planning to tackle an update or two for that while prototyping out a new wallpaper.

We're also working on a framework for supporting OpenGL 2.0, and that's got a lot of progress but isn't quite  ready for use yet.  We'll probably end up releasing one or two effect style wallpapers first that exercise aspects of it before trying a fully fledged 3D scene, but I'm excited to get to that point!

Monday, February 14, 2011

Jumpgate Live Wallpaper v1.0

( Android Market link )

It's been a while since we last released a new wallpaper, but Jumpgate is now available on the market!  This one's Android themed, which seemed appropriate for showing our cool stuff at Mobile World Congress this week.  :)

Jumpgate lets you follow your Android buddy as he soars through space at high speeds!  There's customization options for the background colors, star streak brightness, movement speeds, animation smoothing, and several others.  Double-tapping on different places on the screen causes your Android to wave, barrel roll, or turn on turbo boot for a burst of speed.  If you've got suggestions for other actions he could perform, let us know!


All this turned out quite well in my opinion, and it's exciting to get this out there for folks to see.  Hope everybody likes it!

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

KF Hearts v1.06

  - Bug Fix: Custom locket image refreshing

This was an oversight on my part, really.  What would happen is, if you select a custom image from an SD card, then reboot the phone, you'd get the default image instead.  This is because the SD card doesn't get mounted right away on startup, so the wallpaper starts, goes to load your custom image, discovers it's not accessible, then falls back to the default.

I solve this on the other wallpapers by doing this check periodically, so if it fails the first time it'll work once the card is mounted.  In (I think) all cases, I do the check whenever the wallpaper wakes up from sleep.  So, if you reboot your phone and discover the hearts contain a picture of a kitty, you should find that next time you look at your home screen it's fixed itself.

What's with the lack of updates?

We've got a few things going on right now, actually.  Firstly, we've been invited to show our glorious wares at Mobile World Congress next week, so are making a new wallpaper paying homage to Android for the occasion!  It's called Jumpgate and has our little Android friend soaring through space at faster than light speeds.

Other projects include getting a framework going that has proper support for OpenGL 2.0, so we can start taking advantage of pixel and vertex shaders.  This should let us do some nice effects that aren't feasible with the 1.1 framework we're using now.

There's more than one wallpaper in progress right now as well, but none of them are really at a showable state.  Thus, a few days of general silence on the blog front.  Sorry!