Prismatic Live Wallpaper v1.15

  - Update: Now using Holo style UI on ICS devices
  - Update: New Backgrounds: White Dwarf, Neon

This is primarily a maintenance update with a few extras -- folks on ICS devices get the prettier UI skin on the settings screen now, for one thing.  For another there's a couple nice new background images, check the list for White Dwarf and Neon Lines!

Gallery Live Wallpaper v1.1

  - New Feature: Categories in image browser
  - New Feature: Select All/None in image browser
  - Update: Now using Holo theme on ICS devices
  - Update: Better Market "open" button handling

This update is primarily driven by customer feedback, as the #1 item was definitely being able to view your images by category/folder, and being able to select all of them easily.  To that end we now determine a list of categories, have you select one (or all) then allow you to individually modify the list or select all/none within that category.  It works well in my testing so I'm hoping everybody's getting what they were looking for.  :)

In addition, we've moved the project forward to SDK 14, so it'll use the Holo style UI on supported devices now.

Also, just put up a YouTube video, if you're interested!

Lightscape Live Wallpaper v1.1

  - Update: Name change to Lightscape
  - Update: Additional pattern images
  - Update: Now using ICS SDK/Holo theme

The product formerly known as Wavescape has been renamed, due to a trademark collision.  The new title is Lightscape, but aside from that it's still the same shifting patterns of light rays and general coolness.  :)

As a bonus, anybody with an ICS device gets the Holo theme in their settings now!

Replying to Play Comments

This is pretty awesome.  At long last you can now reply to comments on the Google Play listings!  This doesn't sound like much, but it's not uncommon to see people mention bugs or other issues in the comments, without actually sending you an e-mail.  This makes it effectively impossible to follow up, ask questions, inform them their issues is fixed, etc.  Especially if it's a recently posted product, this is kind of nerve wracking.

No more!  If you log into your Play Publisher account, and head to the comments section on a product listing, you now see a "reply" prompt that does exactly what it says.  The reply is displayed on the listing inside Play, and in addition the user receives a notice that a reply has been posted.

We just tested this, and the user does indeed receive an e-mail.  The text of the reply isn't contained, rather they receive an e-mail from "nobody" (oddly enough) notifying them that one of their comments was replied to by the developer.  A link is provided underneath that.  Clicking the link takes them to their comment and its reply (which worked).  I'm happy to see the message also encourages them to use e-mail for reporting further problems.

Here's a pic of what the user sees:

Gallery Live Wallpaper v1.0

(Google Play full version link)
(Google Play free version link)

(YouTube)

Gallery Live Wallpaper allows you to display your favorite images on your home screen!  You can select from any image on your device, and can customize which transitions and camera behavior you get, how fast the images cycle, and plenty more!

If you don't want to take your own pictures, then you can point it at Reddit or Flickr and it'll download images in the background periodically, so you'll always have something new.  You can provide your own subreddit selections or Flickr search terms to customize what kind of results you get, and can set how frequently checks happen and how much storage will be used.

Additionally, unlike the similar products I've seen on the market,  Gallery is fully OpenGL accelerated, so slow pans and zooms don't have any single-pixel jumps going on that mess up the smooth motion.  It also performs very well, like a slideshow should.

I'm really happy with how this project turned out.  The initial idea was to make something that could emulate the Ken Burns Effect, and it went way further than that over time.  :)

Making this one was something of an educational experience, simply because while most of our projects are using pre-made art, this one doesn't.  It's completely reliant on whatever it is the user provides, so we ran into a few different hurdles making sure there were no visible limitations:

• Modern camera phones take images much bigger than is necessary for the screen, so you have to get their size and reduce it appropriately before you try to do any loading.  Otherwise you'll end up allocating 30 meg to read in a 8 megapixel image, to display on a 1 megapixel screen.
• Reducing at load time generally means reducing by an integer divisor - half size, quarter size, etc.  You don't get a lot of fine control there.
• Despite that, careful not to reduce it too far, otherwise the quality on-screen will suffer.
• Non-power-of-two textures work, but using odd numbers crashes some devices' OpenGL drivers.  Make sure you resize to a even number in both dimensions.  This means you may end up resizing it twice, given the integer resizing issue.
• Some images have EXIF tags to rotate/mirror them.  This is really annoying to deal with, but otherwise you'll end up with a lot of sideways images.

Canabalt HD for Playbook

It took a while to get through the process, but Canabalt HD is now available for purchase on Blackberry App World!  This is taking advantage of RIM's Dalvik compatibility, and runs extremely well on the Playbook.  I'm thrilled to finally have this out there.  :)