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.