OpenGL Config Crash on Smart Watches

After being pretty excited to have gotten a collection of watch faces out and working so quickly, of course an issue had to show up.  In this case we got some crash reports from folks about the Moto360 and the Sony SmartWatch3.  We were kind of surprised, honestly, since we'd been testing extensively on the various emulators and on a LG G Watch R and hadn't seen a single issue.

So, we acquired a Moto360 to test on, and lo and behold it did indeed crash.  After fiddling with bluetooth debugging for a bit, we finally got a working callstack.  So, what was the problem?

Well, we use OpenGL for all this stuff, and when you instantiate an OpenGL viewport you make some requests about color depth, whether you need a z-buffer, etc.  That's all well and good, but it was failing to return a valid viewport on the 360.  As it turns out, we request a 16-bit buffer by default, and the 360 only supports a 32-bit one.  That's something we've never seen from a chipset before.

Our code wasn't tolerant of this situation and since we've never had the problem, it had never really been an issue previously.  So, we made some changes, and now we handle it properly.  Hopefully that wraps things up across the various devices that were seeing a crash, and lets everybody run these with no problems.

As a result, we've updated these products to version 1.11.

Billiards Live Wallpaper v1.2

  - New Feature: Custom table images
  - Google Play Link (free)
  - Google Play Link (paid)

This update allows you to design your own felt patterns!  Or, well, not pattern if you prefer -- there's nothing keeping you from picking a photograph or something either, but the image will mix with the felt texture and lighting so we make no promises about results.

Still, you can get some really nice results out of the proper image, like the example here on the right.  Hopefully folks enjoy!

New Watch Face Features

- New Feature: Battery remaining
- Update: Hide compass prefs if device doesn't support it
- Update: Cleaner data widget rendering

We just updated all five of the current watch faces to v1.1, primarily bringing along the ability to display battery remaining on the watch face.  You can see the design on the image to the right, and the functionality is pretty neat really.  It can display either the watch or the phone's battery, or both simultaneously -- in the image you see here the inside (darker) ring shows the phone's battery remaining, while the outer ring is the watch.  The circles erase themselves counter-clockwise as your battery ticks down.

This set of updates also handles some various cleanup tasks, doing things like hiding the compass prefs if the device doesn't support the necessary sensors, enabling mipmaps on the data readouts (compass, battery, moon phase) so they render a little smoother, and fixing a few small bugs.

Links:

Galactic Core Watch Face
Koi Watch Face
Thunderstorm Watch Face
Clock Tower Watch Face
Autumn Watch Face

Funny Mirror v1.16

  - Update: Larger icons on toolbar
  - Update: New mirror: "Fairly Chaotic"
  - Update: Added links to settings screen
  - Google Play Link (full)
  - Google Play Link (free)

This is a minor update that response to some user feedback for bigger buttons -- honestly, they were pretty small.  This significantly improves that, and also adds in a few links to the settings screen to view other products, etc.

And since it's no fair to do an update without adding something fun, there's a new mirror in the list as well!  It's called "Fairly chaotic", and is demonstrated in the picture to the right.  I've been trying to make a point of including pics in these posts -- if you're thinking I should do something more professionally lit and prepared, you're not wrong.

Saying Hello to Android Wear

We've been preparing for the release of the Watch Face SDK for Android Wear for a while, and were able to move fast when it was finally released.  As a result, we've created a collection of watch faces based on some of our most popular products, and are hoping folks enjoy them!

This was a fairly extensive undertaking that required a fair amount of infrastructure work, so we're offering these as separate products currently, and all are up on Play now.  They require your Wear device to be using Android 5.0 or better, which is currently rolling out to devices and should (theoretically!) be on everything over the next week or so.  Meanwhile folks can grab them if they want, or wait and see once the devices are ready.

The approach we took to adapting our wallpapers was to build a collection of watch faces that can work over a variety of backgrounds, all of which fully support low power mode and other features of Wear.  The user can pick from these faces, enable features like whether there's a second hand, whether they see moon phase or a compass, and what font they prefer.  All the faces work on both square and round screens, with different tick mark art where viable.

This is all in addition to the scene underneath the watch face, which still preserves (nearly) all the same settings and configuration.  Visually they maintain all the same features and animation as well.  Our hope is that folks like this idea, and that we can add additional watch face styles to the list as time goes on.

We're really excited to hear if folks like the approach we've taken and would want more.

Galactic Core Watch Face
Koi Watch Face
Thunderstorm Watch Face
Clock Tower Watch Face
Autumn Watch Face

Pirate Flags Live Wallpaper v1.0

Google Play Link
Youtube Link

Something people ask for a lot is a pirate version of our Flags wallpapers, and I'm happy to get this up there and available for anyone who's interested.

Like the other Flags products we've made it fully supports both landscape and portrait, and has as well animated flag moving in the wind overtop selectable backgrounds.  You can pick a custom image if you like and hoist your own design, or stick with the wide variety of built-in historical images.  Enjoy!

The default background is a Creative Commons image, created by Stuart Mckiggan!

Clock Tower Live Wallpaper v1.2

  - New Feature: Bats!

This doesn't sound like much, but this updates adds random bats that will fly through your clock tower.  That actually looks pretty sweet since the light rays and everything respond appropriately, so it's like being in a dramatic vampire movie.  Enjoy!

Chroma Wave Live Wallpaper v1.1

  - New Feature: Daydream support (4.2+)
  - Update: "Reset to default" buttons in prefs
  - Bug Fix: Resizing behavior on some handsets
  - Google Play link (paid)
  - Google Play Link (free)
  - Youtube Link

This one actually fell below the radar when we did our sweep to get everything updated a while back, sorry about that!  This update brings the product forward to the current version of our framework, and adds Daydream support on appropriate devices.  It also adds a few items to the settings screen to allow you to get back to the default colors and waveforms easily.

We also noticed that this is one of the only products that didn't have a youtube video showing its behavior, so that's been taken care of as well.

Enjoy!

Prismatic Live Wallpaper v2.0

  - New Feature: App mode
  - New Feature: Camera support
  - Google Play Link (full)
  - Google Play Link (free!)

This is a major update that, like we did with Koi Pond, adds the ability to run as an app.  It also allows you to use the device's camera feed as an image, similar to Funny Mirror's functionality.  You can even do this while it's a wallpaper via a widget, a pretty unique feature to toy with.

This also allows you to enable child lock mode, so that you can let your younger kids toy with it and (mostly) not muck up the rest of the system in the process.  :)

Funny Mirror Free v1.1

  - New Feature: Fixed orientation
  - Google Play Link (free!)

One thing that was kind of annoying about this product was that as you were messing with the mirror trying to make a goofy image, it might switch from portrait/landscape in the middle of things.  That didn't seem like good behavior given the typical use case, so this update fixes the window into whatever orientation it was in when launched.

It's kind of a small item but makes it quite a bit more predictable to use, without actually enforcing any specific orientation.  Hopefully folks agree!

Funny Mirror v1.05

  - Update: Two new mirrors: Horizontal Wave, X-Shaped
  - Google Play Link (free!)

This is a minor update that cleans up the labels in the mirror picker list a bit, and which adds a couple new mirrors for your trouble.  The X-shaped one is pretty awesome!

Autumn Tree Live Wallpaper v1.4

  - New Feature: Bald Cyprus Tree
  - Google Play Link (free)
  - Google Play Link (paid)

This is a content update adding a new tree species, our first evergreen!  As usual, pick your colors and background to match.  :)

Halloween Live Wallpaper v1.6

  - Update: Better pumpkin highlights
  - Bug Fix: Resizing on some devices
  - Google Play Link

This is mostly a bug fix release meant to fix the resizing issue -- apparently we missed this one when doing the sweep for that a while back.  While I was at it I updated the pumpkin shader to improve their lighting a little and get them to feel rounder.

Enjoy!

Funny Mirror v1.01

  - Google Play Link (free!)

We're taking a stroll in the free side of things with a goofy little software toy.  Funny Mirror is basically a digital funhouse mirror, allowing you to use either of your phone's cameras to create distorted pictures.  You can save the image to your device, or hit the handy share button and post it to Facebook to entertain (or scare) your friends!

The actual functionality was originally written for a couple of other products, which we'll follow through on before long, but it was a good fit for this sort of thing so we decided to go for it.  From a business standpoint, most of our products are live wallpapers which really don't lend themselves to advertising, so this also gives us a chance to make something with a banner ad and see how that pays off.

And hey, we've laughed a bunch of times playing with it, so it seems to do its job.  :)

Gallery Live Wallpaper v2.2

 - New Feature: Launcher icon intelligently takes you to settings, or to preview
 - Update: Loading dialog at initial thumbnail list creation
 - Update: Better thumbnail creation
 - Google Play Link (free)
 - Google Play Link (paid)

This update does some nice cleanup to make selecting images and browsing them smoother, and also makes the launcher icon behave more intelligently.  Hopefully the whole experience is a bit nicer as a result.  :)

KF Billiards Live Wallpaper v1.1

  - Update: New ball style, Black & White Marble
  - Google Play Link (free)
  - Google Play Link (paid)

Nothing earth shaking here, just a minor update to add a new ball style to the list.  Here's a pic!

Photosphere Live Wallpaper v1.2

  - Update: Support for much larger image sizes
  - New Feature: ETC1 compression for images
  - Google Play Link (free)
  - Google Play Link (paid)

So, one of the main complaints leveled at Photosphere is that the image quality wasn't sharp enough.  To be fair this was sort of true -- we were forced to scale the texture down to whatever the hardware supported.

This update changes that.  If the image is too large for the device's 3D hardware, we now segment it into up to 8 pieces, each one able to be up to that maximum width.  In practice this means you should be able to use a ridiculous 16k wide Photosphere on a lot of devices.

This also eats up massive amounts of RAM, possibly, so at the same time when we store the image we're now compressing it via ETC1.  This takes a bit but means that despite supporting much larger images, it should use less ram at the same time.  It's a win/win really, assuming that brief wait doesn't kill you.

Enjoy!

KF Fireworks Live Wallpaper v1.15

  - Update: New firework type (Heavy Ring!)
  - Update: More available firework colors
  - Update: More variations of dots and streaks
  - Update: Updated icon artwork
  - Google Play Link (full)
  - Google Play Link (free)

This is a modest update that adds some more variation to the fireworks, adding some additional random types of streaks and dots, different variations on the type of glow, and more.  It also adds more colors to the available list, particularly strong bold colors.

Additionally, there's one more type of firework to enable in the list, called Heavy Ring.  This adds more, larger, particles to the standard ring type and hangs round longer besides.  It has a tight white spot with a wide glow.

Photosphere Live Wallpaper v1.1

  - New Feature: Smart launcher icon
  - Update: Settings for pan speed
  - Update: Enable auto-panning

This adds a couple of handy prefs to control camera behavior, notably allowing it to automatically pan around the currently set photosphere.  It also allows you to set the sensitivy of the camera when responding to swipes.

Additionally, given that Photosphere doesn't have the ability to automatically cycle like Gallery does, making sure folks can easily make use of it when they have an interesting image is important.  To that effect, the launcher icon that previously took your to the home screen is now a bit smarter, and if you don't currently have Photosphere set as your wallpaper it'll take you to the preview screen instead, so you can go straight to setting it.  If the wallpaper's already running, it'll smartly go to settings.

Koi Live Wallpaper v1.9

  - New feature: Full screen mode!

Something folks have asked for many times is the ability to use Koi as a sort of 'toy', as in running it full screen without any icons in the way, and being able to interact with it.  This update adds that, and additionally the full version puts in basic access controls, so you can hand it to your toddler and not worry too much about them returning to the home screen and destroying everything.  :)

If you have child mode enabled, touch all four corners of the screen simultaneously to exit.  Otherwise, just hit back.

Zombie Horde Live Wallpaper v1.05

- New Feature: Blood sprays leave marks on the ground!
- Update: Better blood blending
- Update: Different default blood color and weapon loadout

This is an incremental update that should fix a couple minor issues involving blood blending and so on.  It also allows blood spray particles to render into the gore buffer, so you get a sweet blood spray as the bullet exits!

KF Billiards Live Wallpaper v1.0

(Full Version Link)
(Free Version Link)
(YouTube video)

We were surprised to find that there wasn't much for billiards simulations up on Play, especially when it came to live wallpapers, and so figured it'd be fun to put one together quick.  At this point we've done a few different projects for third parties that leaned on physics of one type or another -- shooting basketballs, that sort of thing -- so we had the experience, and things came together quite fast.

The result is a good looking, accurately physics-simulated pool table, which honestly is a pretty fun toy to have running in the background.  We took a few different passes at the ball rendering and have a nice glossy, correct looking result to go along with this, and you can customize the felt color and ball appearances as well!

Interaction is simple, just swipe over a ball (just the cue, by default) and it'll go flying in the appropriate direction.  This is a bit touchy but works well as a background toy, and I'm hoping folks agree!

KF Flames Live Wallpaper v1.4

  - Update: New flame style, High Res
  - Update: Adjusted settings layout
  - Google Play Link (full)
  - Google Play Link (free)

The main point of this update is to get the new flame artwork available to folks.  It's higher resolution and somewhat noisier than the (still default) old style art, but hopefully some folks like it.

Additionally the settings screen was tweaked a bit, just minor layout stuff, nothing big. There's a link to additional products now, if that excites you!

Galactic Core Live Wallpaper v2.41

 - Bug Fix: Crash when changing theme on some locales
  - Google Play Link (full)
  - Google Play Link (free)

There were a couple of other minor localization things as well, but the main one is the crash.  Basically, before we localized anything I went through and separated out any strings that shouldn't be localized.  I missed one, and so depending on how the translator handled it you'd get a crash as it was looking for an improper filename.

This took embarassingly long to realize what was going on, sorry about that folks.  :/

Jumpgate Live Wallpaper v1.7

  - New Feature: Color tint the energy helix!
  - Update: Two new cloud styles
  - Update: Higher res icons
  - Google Play Link (full)
  - Google Play Link (free)

Not an earth shaking update, but this adds a little more customization to the full version, and pretties up the icon on high-end devices on the free.  The rather cryptically named "tint the energy helix" item up there refers to the swirly energy thing in the scene, which already had a pref to enable/disable... now you can tint it and gain a highlight color!

The first of the two new cloud styles is basically a brighter, more variant cloud similar to the original one but streakier.  The second is a very crazy set of gradient rays that goes pretty far into 2001 inside-the-monolith psychedelic territory.

Zombie Horde Live Wallpaper v1.0

  - Google Play Link (full)
  - Google Play Link (free)
  - YouTube

Let's face it, there's not really any reason you need a peaceful home screen.  Step out of that narrow niche and into a wondrous world of zombie carnage!  Defend the last scraps of humanity as they make a final stand out in the wilderness!  Tap on zombies to kill them, or let the folks in the bunker do it for you.  Configure the bunker's weaponry, or whether it exists at all!  All with lighting that reflects the current time of day.

Seriously though, we've been working on this for a while, in particular trying to make sure we could really pile up the blood splats and dead(er) zombies over time.  All the deaths are rendered into a single buffer image that's very slowly faded over time, and if you turn the fading low you can end up with literally hundreds of decals and dead zombies over time.  By default this is a half-res buffer, but you can check a box for a full-res one in the settings if your device is reasonably quick.

The bunker itself is a sort of ramshackle last-stand thing typical of the setting, and we have a few controls letting you choose between rifles, assault weapons, or both.  If this does well we can expand that list in the future, but for now it gives you control over close-in shots or farther away ones.  You can also arm between 1 and 5 survivors, depending on your mood.  Or, well, turn it off and do all the work yourself as you touch the screen.

As with a lot of our products we also allow the lighting to change based on the current time of day, and retrieve your coarse location so we can approximate your actual sunrise/sunset times.  Hopefully folks dig this one, it's pretty far off from our usual passive feeling stuff but I'm hoping there's demand. :)

Friendly Bugs Live Wallpaper v2.3

  - New Feature: Support for additional languages
  - Update: Higher res ladybugs
  - Update: New background: Barn Wood
  - Update: Two new ladybug 'rainbow' colors
  - Google Play Link (full)
  - Google Play Link (free)

This updates adds support for several new languages, similar to the products in the earlier post.  This also adds localization for a couple of smaller things that got overlooked the first time -- don't forget to check your libraries for strings also!

In addition the ladybugs are now double the resolution, though in honesty it doesn't make a whole lot of difference on most devices.  There are two new 'rainbow' colors, and there a new background as well.  Enjoy!

Autumn Tree Live Wallpaper v1.3

  - Update: Two new backgrounds: Mountain & Lake!
  - Update: New icon artwork
  - Google Play Link (full)
  - Google Play Link (free)

This is mostly a content update, with a bit of maintenance to get a more Play compliant icon in place.  The two new backgrounds, particularly Lake, work very well and give some more colors options for the scene.

Blue Skies Live Wallpaper v2.26

  - Update: Adjusted moon positioning
  - Update: New icon artwork
  - Google Play Link (full)
  - Google Play Link (free)

This update addresses a few issues users had about the moon's appearance, specifically the fact that it fades in low enough to overlap some of the background clouds.  This should make the matter better, overall.  Additionally, this has a new icon that will hopefully read better in the listings.

Fireflies Live Wallpaper v1.1

  - Bug Fix: Fixed resizing issue on Nexus 5
  - Update: Icon tweaks
  - New Feature: Twinkling stars
  - New Feature: Shooting stars
  - Google Play Link

This update adds some more activity to the scene in the form of twinkling stars and shooting stars.  Beyond that this is primarily a maintenance release to take care of a screen resizing issue on the Nexus 5, and to update the icon artwork per Play specifications.

Product Localization and the Results Thereof

After largely neglecting localization for most of our products, a while back I decided to go ahead and invest in it for some of the bigger sellers.  I've never been sure how much of a difference it would really make, and many times I've seen debates about how much difference it makes or how much it helps ratings or adoption.  It seemed like it would be nice to put some numbers on this, and we have some products big enough for these to be meaningful.  Now that it's done, I'm hoping to present those numbers here.

I'm not a statistics guy so bear with me.  I'm sure I have some terrible practices, no guarantees, etc etc.  First, some groundwork so readers understand the situation.

Regarding the products themselves: These products are a little unusual in that they're all live wallpapers, so as a whole are quite workable without knowing their native language -- this is part of the reason I've been putting this off so long.  Our business model with them is simple and very friendly, all told.  Our free versions run no advertising and we also do not burden them with a time limit or other intrusions.  Most of them have literally no permissions aside from being a wallpaper itself.

The big separating line between our paid and free versions is access to the settings screen.  The free version is stuck with the default settings, while the paid versions let you switch out backgrounds, adjust colors, turn things on and off, etc.  This is important because when running the free version, pressing the 'settings' button takes the user to a simple dialog explaining that they need the full version to access the settings, and one of the buttons leads them to the Play listing for the paid version.  We call this the upsell window, and this is the only user harassment we do.

The actual localization updates happened in two stages, the first one several months ago updated only the market descriptions.  The second one, a couple weeks ago, updated only the apps themselves (including the upsell window).  I gathered statistics for week-long period before the update event, and a week-long period after, but did not include the week of the update itself.  This is because updating the free versions of the app tends to remind people that they can buy it, so a spike happens in paid version downloads.  I didn't want to include that spike, as it's separate from whatever affect the localization had.

All numbers are using what Google calls "daily installs by user", which tracks the number of unique users who have installed the app for the first time that day.  Long run, this seemed like the value that matters.

Products

I chose to invest in our five biggest selling products: Koi, Aquarium, Blue Skies, Thunderstorm, and Galactic Core.  We updated both the paid and free versions of each.

I've also included a handful of other products that had not been updated during these periods. The market as a whole tends to have a general trend, and I'm hoping this comparison can help isolate the effects of the localizations vs general Play activity changes. To some degree anyway.

Languages

The actual languages we translated to (from American English) are French, Italian, German, Spanish (Spain), Japanese, and Korean. Localizations were all handled by native speakers, at a cost of 9 cents per word. Total, the cost across all projects was around a thousand dollars.


Updating Market Listings

The first update occurred on July 11th 2013, and was to the Play listing only.  This was the three user visible fields: Title, Description, and Promo Text.  We do not localize the change log.

The results are at the right, showing total installs for a week prior to the update, and a week after.  Doing the math on the actual numbers, there's a substantially visible increase in downloads of the free products, and modest increases overall for the paid though not nearly as pronounced.

All of the modified free versions went up. The most modest increase was Koi Free at only 15%, and the most substantial was Thunderstorm Free with a startling 268% rise.  Galactic Core similarly had a dramatic 104% increase.  I initially assumed Thunderstorm's performance had to be something else -- maybe we'd been featured and I hadn't noticed, or something. Surprisingly no, apparently it's huge in Mexico and very few people there were finding it previously.

The chart to the right is clipped from Play's statistics page.  It's a pretty good visualizer of an unattended market being reached for the first time, and honestly is pretty inspiring from the stand point of justifying the investment.

That said, the paid versions didn't get nearly the dramatic shift.  They still gained overall, but the biggest winner was Koi easily -- interesting considering the free version didn't shift very much. Koi's paid version gained 42.7%, a lot of which seems to have come from Japan based on the breakdown for that period. Others went down, though, so the overall paid version growth wasn't large.  Still, the average DID go up, which is notably better than our control group did.

The average install changes, post Play listing translation, ended up being:

• Free Versions: 94.8%
• Unmodified Free Versions: -1.2%
• Paid Versions: 10.5%
• Unmodified Paid Versions: -16.35%

Updating In-App Strings

The more recent update was for the in-app strings themselves.  Paid and free versions of all five products were updated on April 3rd, 2014.  Notably this includes the text in the upsell window that was mentioned earlier, beyond that most of the text is things like the title of the product and strings on the settings screen. At this point, the Play descriptions had been localized for several months.

This time the results were basically flopped. The free versions didn't show any great gains, but the paid versions grew nicely. Again, Koi was an anomaly, actually losing a few percent after the translations. Everything else got a nice double-digit boost, with Galactic Core being the strongest at a substantial 54.3%.

That said, the market for the control group drifted upwards too, so the overall gain wasn't quite that dramatic assuming it works as an indicator.  Every category this time had an overall upward trend.

The actual update week itself had a pretty significant spike when the updates occurred, which is typical whenever we update the free versions -- the app updating presumably reminds people there's a paid version they could be using. The middling change to the free version downloads here makes sense, since as mentioned these products don't have a lot of language barrier to begin with, and without access to the settings there's not much to even see aside from the name.

However, the week-after results here suggest to me that we actually drive a reasonable amount of traffic from free to paid via that "Get the Full Version" button.

The average install changes, post in-app translation, ended up:

• Free Versions: 5.6%
• Unmodified Free Versions: 9.9%
• Paid Versions: 28.9%
• Unmodified Paid Versions: 17.6%

Summary

Not a whole lot to say really, aside from the fact that we really should've done this a while ago.  Looking at this math it seems likely it will pay for the time and expense easily given a little time, and if these were applications more dependant on language I'd imagine the results would be amplified.

Plasma Orb Live Wallpaper v1.0

  - Google Play Link (full)
  - Google Play Link (free)


A while back, mostly for debugging purposes, we added the ability to render out spline paths into the scene.  This actually worked pretty well, and so it seemed like a cool thing to make use of.  We did some searching and noticed that while there were a whole lot of plasma ball live wallpapers out there, none of them really simulated a plasma ball very well.

Thus, we have a new product!  Plasma Orb Live Wallpaper replicates and look and feel of an actual plasma ball extremely well, right on down to the reflectiveness of the glass.  It fully supports multiple touches (up to ten) and lets you customize colors, backgrounds, camera position, and all sorts of other stuff.

Let us know what you think!

Three of the built-in backgrounds are making use of Creative Commons Attribution media. Credit for the initial imagery goes to Sweety187, Nicolas Raymond, and hmomoy!

Aquarium Live Wallpaper v3.3

  - Update: Higher res plants!
  - Update: New fish!
  - Update: Nicer overhead light!
  - Bug Fix: Resizing issue on 4.4 devices
  - Google Play Link

Given Aquarium's popularity we really should've updated this one with the resizing fix sooner, but I elected to wait until we could get some updated content ready.  The main one is revisions to the plant imagery, they're quite a lot bigger and sharper now.  This work is courtesy of Kim Lathrop, who put a lot of time into updating the images while still keeping to the spirit of the originals.  Check out the comparison to the right!

This update also adds a new fish species to the list, and makes some changes to the motion of the overhead light.  It's a little nicer with more variety to it now, hopefully folks approve!

Photosphere Live Wallpaper v1.02

  - Bug Fix: Image reading on 4.4+ devices
  - Bug Fix: Viewport resizing on 4.4+ devices
  - Update: Ad on settings page (free version)
  - Update: Higher res icon artwork
  - Google Play Link (free w/ ad)
  - Google Play Link (paid)

This is a maintenance update for Photosphere that should make it well behaved on the Nexus5 and other 4.4 devices.  We had to add a permission for some types of image access, and fixed some of the same assumptions that I detailed a few weeks back regarding image loading.  It should be in good condition now.  This one fell through the cracks a bit as it has some custom image reading code (for the photoshere metadata) that didn't fall under the net of the framework changes we made.

I feel somewhat guilty about it, but we added a single AdMob ad to the settings screen. There's now a paid version that removes this (if folks prefer) but honestly if you prefer, using the free version with an ad there is totally cool with us too.  Don't worry, it doesn't interfere with usage at all, it's just on the settings screen.  Once you're done there you'll never see it again.