NCAA Jersey Live Wallpaper

( Android Market link )

Adding another one in the NCAA category, looks like our second project there just went live!  This one displays your favorite NCAA team jersey, customized with whatever name and number you'd like!  If you're a fan, check it out!

How to Crash a Galaxy S II via the Date Class

We just ran up against this one in a project that's set to launch any day now: a crash that only happened on Samsung Galaxy S II phones, only when set to the Sydney, Australia time zone, and only when using the DD/MM/YYYY date format.

The culprit was eventually tracked down to be the way we were storing time stamps in our text-based save data. This simplified example of what we were doing will crash the above configuration every time:

final Date source = new Date();
final String serialized = source.toString();
final Date dest = new Date( serialized );

The solution was pretty straightforward once we identified the problem. We now store the milliseconds value from the Date object rather than the formatted display text:

final Date source = new Date();
final String serialized = String.valueOf( source.getTime() );
final Date dest = new Date( Long.parseLong(serialized) );

It's a simpler approach and therefore probably what we should have been using since the start, but that's with the benefit of hindsight. The original approach is totally valid according to the Android documentation and survived months of mixed casual and focused testing. It's a pretty good example of one of the weird problems an application can run into out in the wild that are almost impossible to anticipate.

We were extremely lucky to have a someone testing the application in just the right place and with just the right hardware. He snipped a copy of the system log containing the crash from his phone using alogcat. That led us down the path of being able to locally reproduce the problem and ultimately fix it.

Are you an NCAA Basketball fan? Check this out!

( Android Market link )

We've been working with the folks over a 2Thumbz on a couple of NCAA based projects, and the first one went live last night!  It's an attractive Sports-Center style treatment of the various school logos, with real-time light rays and a selection of different backgrounds.  It's quite good looking in my opinion and well worth a look if you're a fan!

Aquarium Live Wallpaper v1.7

  - Update: New background!
  - Update: Two new fish!

This is a content update adding a new background painting, and a couple new fish!  The background is a very cool undersea city painted by Kim Lathrop!

Enjoy!

Blue Skies Live Wallpaper v2.05

  - New Feature: Set light color (non time of day)
  - Update: Better color swatch pref appearance

A customer pointed out a little while back that while we said in our upsell text you could set the color of the light, in actuality we only let you do that when messing with the time of day.  This is a fair point, and this update adds that feature.

In addition, previously our custom color swatch preference had font sizes that mismatched when you were running Gingerbread -- I've put in a bit of a special case that should help that.  Please let me know if the preference screen looks like gibberish on anyone's device.

Dynamic Paint Live Wallpaper v1.2

  - Update: Stability improvements
  - Update: Color swatches on settings screen
  - Update: Better color picker on settings screen

This update primarily brings Paint in line with the current version of our framework, which should give it a number of general stability and performance improvements.  It also gains a better color picker, color swatch display on settings screen, and a few other niceties like that.  :)