Binary Tree - Come On...

I recently published a new Live Wallpaper called "Binary Tree". It is not based on any of my "Nature" projects published before, and is quite different. As was "Magnitic Balls", another one that I published in the beginning of the summer. The latter soon became quite popular (> 93 000 downloads since Jun 19).

I'm quite pleased with this new "Binary Tree" lwp. It has loads of settings and you can make the tree look and behave extremely different.

In the basic setup, it's a tree with branches in different lengths, and all branches end in a 1 or 0. Branches sway slowly, so the tree never is static. And branches go in all directions, including Z, making it very much 3d. When you swipe to change home screens, the tree turns around its own Y axis. That means that it is spinning.

Branches have a life time, and after a while the fade away, giving room for a new branch to get born. The new branch is "drawn" by a glowing cursor, and as it gets fully grown the cursor explodes in a flash of light leaving a 0 or 1 when it fades out.

However, my users don't seem to recognize it at all. Downloads are very modest. You should really try it out. Much work and thinking behind this one! Make use of your 15 minutes of refund time and try all the settings in order to make it look just the way you like it, at this time. And change it later on. I think it's very cool, and trust that you will too! :)

Full version
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adermark.binarytreefull

Free version
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adermark.binarytreefree

Autumn Lake

While I was at it... I made another autumn live wallpaper, this time based on my "Reflections" project instead of the previous that was based on my "Flowers" project. Previous reflections wallpapers are "Mountain Lake", "Forest Lake" and a couple of more.

I made few additions to this one (except the pictures of course), but I added the option to completely remove the foreground (flowers and grass), leaving more screen space for the water reflections. And I also added the option to select between two different backgrounds.

The colorful autumn forests look very good reflecting in the water as the sky and clouds shift in different colors during the day.

Full version:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adermark.autumnlakefull

Free version:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adermark.autumnlakefree

Autumn Trees

The circle is closed. Winter, Spring, Summer... and now Autumn Trees. One tree live wallpaper for each season. This one is quite similar to summer trees, of course with different trees, colors and background. And with the addition of being able to select different types of falling objects (leaves in different colors or the spinning seeds from summer trees).

As always, two versions. One free with most settings locked. And one full with tons of settings, priced the lowest allowed by Google - $0.99 (+ VAT if you're in Europe). Both are, of course, ad free.

Recognize the tree? Yes it's the same as the "Summer Trees" maple. It worked well just changing the color in Photoshop. The oak is there as well, with modified leaf colors. I did add some "real" autumn trees to select from as well though; one yellow maple, one maple that shifts from green to orange and one rowan tree with red berries. All in all five trees to choose from.
 

Hope you like it!

Full version:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adermark.autumntreesfull

Free version:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adermark.autumntreesfree

Sea of Poppies

I have been busy with a customer project for the last month, hence no new releases.

Today, however, I thought I had some time to do other stuff, so I started with a new poppy wallpaper. I already have one out, but it's focused on more close-ups of the flowers. I wanted one where you see them from a distance and get the feeling of a red sea of poppies.

I found this gorgeous cc image by Geomangio a while ago and have wanted to do something with it since then:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/geomangio/488581670/

So I isolated the background and then used some of my previous objects to compile this new "Sea of Poppies Live Wallpaper". Hope you like it!

Find it here:
Sea of Poppies (Full Version)
Sea of Poppies (Free Version)

InstaSquare

For the first time in a long while I'm releasing something that's not a wallpaper. The new app is a simple photo-editing app called InstaSquare.

Instagram for Android was an instant hit and I started using it with my iPhone friends who where already in there. I quickly noticed the limitations of the square format though. Since I'm also a photographer and often want to share real photos and I had to crop them badly to put them on instagram.

So I made this app where it's very easy to either just use your photo without crop, or fine tune it by just zooming in a little, moving it around in the square frame or even rotating it without limitations (not just the 90 degrees that are so common) with an easy rotating gesture using your thumb and index finger (pinch). The free rotation feature is rarely found in other photo edit apps, and no one I have seen does it as easy and fast as InstaSquare.

I plan to extend the functinality by letting the user select background color, maybe add textured backrounds and increase the photo size from 1024x1024 to 2048x2048 in the near future.

Also I will release a free version of the app with some functions locked.

Magnetic Balls

So this new Magnetic Balls Live Wallpaper is a bit different from most of my previous wallpapers. It's not about nature, skies, clouds, stars, birds or even flowers. It's just lots and lots of balls. They follow your touch and are sucked towards your finger. And after a while they drop and fall right back where they started. There are a bunch of settings in the full version:

- Object shape (they don't have to be balls)
- Grid distance
- Distance between balls
- Lift speed (how fast do they "jump")
- Gravity (how fast do they fall)
- Float time (increase to make them stay in the air in the highest position before dropping)
- Ball size
- Lift neighbors (how many neighbor balls are affected when a ball starts to fly)
- Color of balls
- Random color changes when touched (on/off)

Playing around with these controls can make them change behaviour quite dramatically. From a slow jello to popping popcorns.

If color changes are enabled each swipe will generate a new random color and the balls you touch shift color. After that they "bleed" this color to their neigbors and after a while all colors start blending together to a nice smooth gradient. Your wallpaper never will look the same from one minute to another.

And please comments, bug reports, improvements, suggestions - just write them here in this blog.

Enjoy!

Birch Wood

I have wanted to do something like this for a while. I visualized the birch forest with just white birch trunks. However after deploying the first version I couldn't make it look as I wanted, the trunks where just too tall (attached image) when in portrait mode (which must be the most common mode by far). So I started looking for a nice clean birch crown to add to the top of the trunks. After hours of searching both on Flickr creative commons and stock photo sites I couldn't find anything that looked nice. I added some green leaves but am not quite happy with the result. Better than the first release but I have to keep looking. Or bring my camera for a birch-hunt.

Summer Trees

In the beginning there was Twin Trees. Then came Winter Trees. After that Spring Trees. And now the time has come for.... *drumroll* ...SUMMER TREES. Big surprise, right?

Spring trees is still my best seller live wallpaper. I wonder if this one will be popular as well?

For starters there are choices between maple tree and oak tree. Daisies and red clovers for the foreground selection, and two different backgrounds (or none at all). Instead of petals or leaves flying in the air, this one has spinning green seeds falling from the sky.

And of course all the usual settings for time, clouds, moon, sun, stars, birds etc.

Enjoy.

Night Sky Part 2

Second try... I got a complaint that the sky had too much stars. And since I like to give the option to customize everything, I threw the static night sky photo away and made my own instead. Now you can set how many stars you like. And while I was at it, I added twinkling stars and shooting stars as well. And of course the option to turn them off too.


The sky is a separate texture that is created once every time the star count is changed. So I didn't have to keep performance in mind when deciding max star count. 5000 is max now, since I thought 10000 made the night sky a bit too cluttered.

Clover Field

Just released a new flower wallpaper - Clover Field Live Wallpaper.

This time with red clovers and I added an extra "grass type" with just clover leaves as an option. I made one small improvement in the general "Flowers" project, now the flowers can have an y-offset making them appear different in height. The clovers can vary 30% from their original height in this particular lwp.

I also found some very nice looking cc licensed trees on Flickr for the background.

And I finally built me a macro for exporting all icon png:s as well as a .vbs file to move them in the right folders. This will save some boring admin time in the future.

Enjoy! :)

Night Sky Part 1

After multiple requests I have decided to start implementing a night sky with stars. First version is now out in Rose Garden Live Wallpaper and Corn Field Live Wallpaper.

This one is a static night sky, I will add twinkling stars and shooting stars later on.

Now, time for weekend!

Rose Garden

I had less development time this week due to kindergarten party, wife having to visit the doctor and a business meeting. And as described earlier inspiration has been low. But I did manage to get another wallpaper ready just before Friday's work day ended.

My wife has been on to me for a while about making a live wallpaper with roses. I started the work a couple of times but never really could see how I would do it. I couldn't just use my flower template because roses don't grow on a field with one flower on a stem like daisies or dandelions. However I finally tried it with some more bush like cc images of different pink roses I found on Flickr. Then I played with the angle and size and think the end result was pretty nice:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adermark.rosesfree

I don't know why but I visualized the background as something old with stones, a ruin, a cottage or a wall. When I found a nice creative commons photo of Visingsborg Castle on Visingsö, Sweden I grabbed my tablet and pen and quickly cut it out, stitched the left and right side together for the eternal horizontal scroll and I think it fitted nice into the rose garden.

I also added some rose petals falling like snow from the sky. How can they do that? Where do they come from? I don't know. Maybe there was a storm that carried them long and high by the wind. It really doesn't matter. It looks nice. And If you don't like it, you can always move the petal count slider to zero. :)

If the Rose Garden Live Wallpaper hits some downloads I will isolate some more roses in different colors and add the option to change roses in the full version.

Mount Rainier

Based on the previous quite popular "Mountain Lake Live Wallpaper" I decided to make a similar, with different background and foreground flowers. I found this very nice photo of Mount Rainier taken by Frank Kovalchek that felt like made for a wallpaper: "Stitched shot of Mt. Rainier and Little Tahoma reflected on Bench Lake".

Please have a look at Mount Rainier Live Wallpaper on Google Play.

Instead of using lupins and dandelions I hunted down some creative commons photos of fireweed (that took ages to isolate with the pen and tablet) for the foreground flowers. I think those work well with a landscape like this.

I also included the new easter egg function "Bird Hunt Mode" for both the paid and free version.

Other than that this lwp is very similar to Mountain Lake so if you already are using that one, this might not add so much to your lwp collection. Some small improvements with the scroll and waves; the scroll should be more consistent now when changing wallpaper priority. The waves were too fast before on new high end phones. Their speed are now system clock based and should be the same regardless of the device's computing power.

* * *

About Mount Rainier

Mount Rainier is a massive stratovolcano located 54 miles (87 km) southeast of Seattle in the state of Washington, United States. It is the most topographically prominent mountain in the contiguous United States and the Cascade Volcanic Arc, with a summit elevation of 14,411 ft (4,392 m). Mt. Rainier is considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world, and it is on the Decade Volcano list. Because of its large amount of glacial ice, Mt. Rainier could potentially produce massive lahars that would threaten the whole Puyallup River valley.

About Fireweed

Epilobium angustifolium, commonly known as Fireweed (mainly in North America), Great Willow-herb (Canada), or Rosebay Willowherb (mainly in Britain), is a perennial herbaceous plant in the willowherb family Onagraceae. It is native throughout the temperate Northern Hemisphere, including large parts of the boreal forests.

Bird Hunt Mode

I have been out of inspiration and energy the last days. So instead of looking for new scenes for live wallpapers I have been playing around with the birds in my Landscape project. In the settings it's now possible to enable "Bird Hunt Mode" and then just tap on the screen where you want to shoot. The first wallpaper where this has been implemented (still beta) is "Misty Forest". For now I have decided to leave the option to enable bird hunt mode in both the free and full version.

I have also added some stats:

- shots fired
- hits
- kills
- direct kills

Maybe it would be nice to add a global hiscore table as well. Let's see if there are any more than me who find this a fun "easter egg" though... :)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adermark.forestmistfull