Wednesday 29 February 2012

These messes I'm in and out of.

It's been a while since my last post so I thought it was about time to do a quick roundup of the current (shambolic, but fortunately improving) state of development in my apps.


Stalin Phone... Where it all started.

I started working on a video recording version of Stalin Phone some time ago and got caught in a bit of a snag. It seems that video recording is not possible without a VideoView object from the layout (failed attempts included declaring a new video view in code). This puts me in a bit of a pickle as Stalin Phone runs in the background with no UI. I have come up with a couple of possible solutions to this since I last worked on it. One possibility is to use a custom toast notification with an embedded video view, possibly this might fall when the toast is dismissed but I could probably set it's timeout high enough to outlast your average call. Secondly (and preferably) I could try replacing the current notification with a custom status bar notification... the snag here being that I am not yet sure how much raw access to the custom layout I will have (i.e. Can I directly grab the video view or do I only get access to a handler).

This leads into another couple of side projects I started to explore the world of status bar notifications.

Photo-A-Day... Simple notifications.
This is probably the most likely project to finish first as I haven't so much hit a snag as I have got distracted.

I now have the framework for the app set up, just need to add shared preferences storage (started), resume on power up and a little bit of cut and polish :p



Motivational Puzzles demonic offspring: Pseudomonarchia Daemonum...
 I've also refocused motivational puzzle into a demonic motivational piece based off the demonic book of names... Maybe an angelic counterpart should be on the books for the future.


The experimental Puzzle Cam has also halted in its tracks for the time being as the rom I'm running (BCM) has flakey camera support at the moment. Last time I was working on it I was close to cracking the camera preview frame (fuzzy green images in triplicate), but not quite yet and I'm not sure when I'll pick this one up again. Low priority.


Finally we come to my two babies: Target Live Wallpaper and Mou5e Live Wallpaper.
Not much happening on the mouse lwp, but target lwp is almost exploding with new features. Well at least two anyway. I made some progress with the fireworks module, fireworks now explode better and fall back towards earth after explosion.
I'm most excited about the last feature (mainly because I just nailed it about an hour ago): importing custom models... For now it's importing a hard coded sample, but once I integrate xml parsing it should be a sinch to import any model from Google sketchpadsketchup to use as the 3d model. Woot!

Also just added "orbitals" checkout the video below to see the demo :D