Friday, December 12, 2014

Saying Hello to Android Wear

We've been preparing for the release of the Watch Face SDK for Android Wear for a while, and were able to move fast when it was finally released.  As a result, we've created a collection of watch faces based on some of our most popular products, and are hoping folks enjoy them!

This was a fairly extensive undertaking that required a fair amount of infrastructure work, so we're offering these as separate products currently, and all are up on Play now.  They require your Wear device to be using Android 5.0 or better, which is currently rolling out to devices and should (theoretically!) be on everything over the next week or so.  Meanwhile folks can grab them if they want, or wait and see once the devices are ready.

The approach we took to adapting our wallpapers was to build a collection of watch faces that can work over a variety of backgrounds, all of which fully support low power mode and other features of Wear.  The user can pick from these faces, enable features like whether there's a second hand, whether they see moon phase or a compass, and what font they prefer.  All the faces work on both square and round screens, with different tick mark art where viable.

This is all in addition to the scene underneath the watch face, which still preserves (nearly) all the same settings and configuration.  Visually they maintain all the same features and animation as well.  Our hope is that folks like this idea, and that we can add additional watch face styles to the list as time goes on.

We're really excited to hear if folks like the approach we've taken and would want more.

Galactic Core Watch Face
Koi Watch Face
Thunderstorm Watch Face
Clock Tower Watch Face
Autumn Watch Face

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Pirate Flags Live Wallpaper v1.0

Google Play Link
Youtube Link

Something people ask for a lot is a pirate version of our Flags wallpapers, and I'm happy to get this up there and available for anyone who's interested.

Like the other Flags products we've made it fully supports both landscape and portrait, and has as well animated flag moving in the wind overtop selectable backgrounds.  You can pick a custom image if you like and hoist your own design, or stick with the wide variety of built-in historical images.  Enjoy!

The default background is a Creative Commons image, created by Stuart Mckiggan!

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Clock Tower Live Wallpaper v1.2

  - New Feature: Bats!

This doesn't sound like much, but this updates adds random bats that will fly through your clock tower.  That actually looks pretty sweet since the light rays and everything respond appropriately, so it's like being in a dramatic vampire movie.  Enjoy!

Monday, November 17, 2014

Chroma Wave Live Wallpaper v1.1

  - New Feature: Daydream support (4.2+)
  - Update: "Reset to default" buttons in prefs
  - Bug Fix: Resizing behavior on some handsets
  - Google Play link (paid)
  - Google Play Link (free)
  - Youtube Link

This one actually fell below the radar when we did our sweep to get everything updated a while back, sorry about that!  This update brings the product forward to the current version of our framework, and adds Daydream support on appropriate devices.  It also adds a few items to the settings screen to allow you to get back to the default colors and waveforms easily.

We also noticed that this is one of the only products that didn't have a youtube video showing its behavior, so that's been taken care of as well.

Enjoy!

Friday, November 7, 2014

Prismatic Live Wallpaper v2.0

  - New Feature: App mode
  - New Feature: Camera support
  - Google Play Link (full)
  - Google Play Link (free!)

This is a major update that, like we did with Koi Pond, adds the ability to run as an app.  It also allows you to use the device's camera feed as an image, similar to Funny Mirror's functionality.  You can even do this while it's a wallpaper via a widget, a pretty unique feature to toy with.

This also allows you to enable child lock mode, so that you can let your younger kids toy with it and (mostly) not muck up the rest of the system in the process.  :)

Funny Mirror Free v1.1

  - New Feature: Fixed orientation
  - Google Play Link (free!)

One thing that was kind of annoying about this product was that as you were messing with the mirror trying to make a goofy image, it might switch from portrait/landscape in the middle of things.  That didn't seem like good behavior given the typical use case, so this update fixes the window into whatever orientation it was in when launched.

It's kind of a small item but makes it quite a bit more predictable to use, without actually enforcing any specific orientation.  Hopefully folks agree!