Ascension - Live Wallpaper

[Nil]

Howdy - I've just released my first app, the Ascension live wallpaper, on the Market. Well, I released it yesterday, so maybe not just released...

Anyhow, Ascension draws vertical, colored bars that respond to touch. It's fairly simple, there's not a whole lot to explain about it. You can customize how the bars react to touch, the color of the bars, how many bars there are, what the bars look like, how quickly color changes, etc. and more options for customization may be added later. I probably can't describe it as accurately as I would like, so here are a few pictures:



Click any image for full size

Ascension was made mainly with performance in mind, since I'd noticed that most live wallpapers, when I used them on my Droid 1, would more or less reduce launcher performance. As a result, I've done a lot of work in making sure the code behind Ascension won't ruin batteries or performance.

It works in portrait and landscape, for phones whose launchers go to landscape, or alternate launchers that can use live wallpapers and go landscape. It's been tested in the Droid and Droid X's default launchers, the HTC Evo's launcher, Helix Launcher 2, and LauncherPro (the one I prefer to use) thus far.

I'm not sure what else I ought to mention about compatibility here, so let me know if you need more info.

It's available for $0.99 on the market under Apps>Themes. You can get to the market page using this market link (only works on phones), by searching for "Ascension" and picking "Ascension Live Wallpaper" out of the results, or you can use this QR code:

If you have any questions, comments, or feedback on anything, I'd be happy to try to answer any questions and will take any feedback I can get, especially if you think there's something that needs improvement (including how I wrote this post ).

 

[Nil]

Just posting a note that I've updated Ascension to v1.5.0, which includes some additional preferences, two new bar images, and bug fixes.

Version incremented to v1.5.0 (version code 105000).
Additions

• Added an

 

[Nil]

Two updates on this. Firstly, Ascension Lite is released.

Ascension Lite is essentially a demo version of Ascension. This is to give people a way to look at the app in a limited fashion, and so they can see what settings are available when they purchase the app. This way, users can decide what's important to them and either buy the full version or continue using the lite version if they don't want any of the extra features (there is no time limit, nag screen, or other obnoxious thing to force you to upgrade and the only "ad" is a button in the settings that will take you to the Ascension market page).

If you want to look at it, you can use this QR code to grab to it on the Android Market:

I can't currently find Ascension Lite on AppBrain so to settle that, if you'd like to view it on your desktop in some way, you can check it out here at AndroidZoom. I'll edit this post to include a link to the AppBrain page as well whenever it's caught in an update.

Right now, the free version is a bit of an experiment for me, so hopefully it works out well and everyone is happier for it.

Secondly, version 1.6 of Ascension was released, which included some new features/bar images and fixes. The changes for that follow:

v1.6.0

Additions
* Added Uniform Height & Width options.  When toggled, these disable the 
variable width and height of color bars respectively.
* Added Flipped Bars option, which will vertically flip all color bars when 
enabled.
* Increased the maximum amount of bar overlap to 200%.  This creates a neat 
look with the glow image.  The downside, however, is that increased overlap 
also increases the amount of drawing your device will have to do, so keep in 
mind that its use comes at the cost of overall performance (especially on 
lower-end phones).
* Added the _Stripes_ image.  This one tends to only look good with uniform 
width and height and with an overlap that's a multiple of 50 (so 0, 50, 100, 
150, 200).  That said, I didn't want to leave it out just because there are 
conditions where it doesn't look its best.
* Added the _Solid Color_ image.  This is not actually an image, but a lack 
thereof (literally, as there is no image file associated with this choice) - if 
you have lower end hardware, using this can sometimes result in some speed 
increase.

General
* A handful of images have gotten some improvements in the way of slightly 
higher resolution (namely, Glow, Light, Beams, and Divisor).  They should look 
a bit better now.
* Removed some redundant code that was not really helping with anything, but 
was probably taking a few cycles unnecessarily.
* Tried to reduce memory usage some more.  I think I'm pretty limited.
* Some minor performance improvements.  These probably won't be noticeable in 
use, unfortunately, since most performance is up to how much is being drawn by 
OpenGL.

As usual, if there are any questions, feedback, requests, etc., then I'm all ears.

 

[Yenzehn]

I will buy the full version if you make it available outside the android market.

Also, 100% brightness looks a bit too right as default for me (HTC Desire, OLED) - 70% provides much deeper colours, probably doesn't matter but I think a lower default might give a better first impression.

 

[Nil]

Sorry, but I don't have any plans to make Ascension available outside of the Market. The alternative is things like SlideMe and those random other third-party markets I get spam about in my Market address, and I don't trust them with security as much as I do with Google, so they're off-limits until they can prove themselves somehow.

As for the default brightness, the option was introduced in an update, so the default had to be 100%, or it would result in different visuals for everyone who updated, which would peeve me and probably others if they'd gotten stuff set up and then had to go into the settings after an update just to fix the brightness. It may be possible to alter the default now, assuming by now everyone has updated to the latest version, but an assumption like that could be problematic.

Edit: Also, thanks for being the first to reply other than me. Was getting a bit lonely.

 

[EMT883]

Nice. Will it work on a htc desire?

 

[Nil]

I believe it should. If your phone supports Live Wallpapers (that is, if you know it does), then I can't imagine why it wouldn't work, at least. Give the Lite version a try, that way you should be able to get an idea of how it looks and performs on your phone before buying (or if you like the Lite version as it is, there's no need to buy it).

 

[OFI]

I can confirm it works on the Desire, tried the Lite version last night and it's one of the far better Live Wallpapers i've seen however I try not to use them myself

I'd almost say the Lite version is too generous though, i'd probably put a watermark on it or something.

 

[Nil]

I got around to releasing v1.7 earlier today, which brings a few new features:

• Custom Touch Color (the color bars will have when touched)
• Custom Background Color
• Multiply Blending
• Random Flipping of Bars

Three of these - multiply blending, background color, and bar flipping - can be seen in a comparison picture of multiply blend when on and off, as well as another picture using multiply, random flipping, and a light-purple-ish background:


Click either image for full size

There's slightly more explanation of these in a blog post talking about the update. The post is about upcoming features as it was written prior to 1.7's release, but this is on the Market right now.

Edit: I think I'll also move those pictures to the top of the thread. The ones at the start were pretty outdated and not very good looking by comparison, so I'm going to see about getting more pictures.