Aquarium Live Wallpaper v2.55

  - New Feature: Random fish!

As mentioned a couple days ago, the main addition to this update is randomized fish!  If you select the question mark icon in the fish select window, you'll end up with a fish that randomly changes its species periodically!

The logic here is that every time the wallpaper goes to sleep (meaning your phone went to sleep, or the home screen otherwise is no longer active), we roll the dice on any random fish in the scene.  There's about a 5% chance any given once will change to a different one.  This means they're not changing constantly, but will shift over time so you get to see different ones.

Due to a limitation with the AI, Jellyfish aren't in the random fish list.  Sorry!

Next Aquarium update

I've got an update ready to go for Aquarium that will let you set a fish as 'random'.  Basically, the fish selection window now has a "?" option, which will let you set that particular fish to change its species occasionally.  This means you can choose how many random fish you want.

There's some loading/unloading on the fly going on here so I'm going to run it for a while and make sure there's no problem, but it seems to work pretty well.  Here's a pic!

True Blood Live Wallpaper

In addition to other things, we've been busy the last few weeks creating a promotional project for the good folks over at HBO.  As a result, we've got the official True Blood live wallpaper up for download on the Market now!

What we have here is a blood pool on your home screen, that responds to touch and device movement, creating waves and ripples that behave realistically.  You can double-tap to fade in or out the logo overlay.  We put a lot of time into getting a good looking liquid simulation running well across all devices, and even have it multithreaded to take advantage of a dual-core device if you have one.  It behaves and settles out extremely well, and we learned a lot about this sort of thing in the process.

Both HBO and Admob have been very good to work with, and I'm thrilled we could tackle this project for them.  :)

Patterns Live Wallpaper v1.02

  - Bug Fix: Crash on 2.3.x devices

I actually pulled this off the market back when we published Prismatic, since it's prettier and I didn't want Patterns to eat into it's market share.  Still, I got an e-mail informing me it crashes on 2.3.x devices and after confirming this is the case, I just published an update to it.  Not really sure if the Market will recognize this and update folks -- I did hit the update button on it, so I kind of think so.

Adding a facebook link!

That's right, we actually set up a Facebook page.  Visit it, follow it, like it, whatever you kids do.  We appreciate the attention, believe me!  :)

Blue Skies v1.5

  - Update:  Better sun blending
  - Bug Fix:  Better behavior when loading preview screen while wallpaper already applied

That's my hope anyway, for the bug fix.  I turned a number of TGAs into PNGs so they can avoid the uncompressing cycle and such, my best guess is some handsets are having issues with that.  The TGAs were also right on the 512k size borderline, which makes me nervous.  Hopefully this smooths things out a bit.

While I was at it I took another pass at the sun and updated the way it blends, I think it reads better now.  The sun textures are also greyscale now, so they'll use a quarter of the ram they did before.