We’ve been working quite a bit in the last couple of weeks on a new wallpaper, and we’ve just finished it tonight. It’ll be out very soon, this week, and we’ll have all the details when we release the wallpaper.
In the meantime, we’ve been putting plans together to start making our tutorials, both on Android development and on basic design for apps. We’re going to be pretty busy this summer, working on the tutorials and our own wallpapers.
Ben Oztalay
COO + Co-Founder
The Game of Life Live Wallpaper, an interactive and customizable Live Wallpaper, is based on Conway’s Game of Life
April 2, 2012 (Ann Arbor, MI): Tabus Nine Computing (www.tabusnine.com), a mobile application developer for the Android operating system, has announced a new Live Wallpaper for Android devices. The Live Wallpaper, Game of Life Live Wallpaper, is based on Conway’s Game of Life, and its aesthetics will appeal even to users who may not be familiar with the cellular automaton.
In Conway’s Game of Life, “cells” exist in a grid, which live and die depending on how many neighbors they have. The rules that govern the cells can produce mesmerizing patterns over time. Game of Life Live Wallpaper renders the cells fading in an out as they live and die, with many options for coloring the cells.
“Game of Life Live Wallpaper was distributed with a free and paid version” said Austin Mueller and Ben Oztalay, co-owners of Tabus Nine. “The full version features five different display modes, which each allow the user to customize how the cells are colored and displayed.”
The first, and simplest, display mode colors the living cells a solid color of the user’s choosing. The second colors the cells differently depending on how long they’ve been alive, picking colors from a palette. Users can select, edit, and create their own palettes.
The Time of Day display mode uses a special palette of colors associated with times of the day to change the color of the cells as the day progresses. Another display mode turns your wallpaper into a battery indicator, coloring the cells from green to red depending on the phone’s battery level. Lastly, the By Touch display mode changes the color of the cells whenever the screen is touched.
Android was listed as the best-selling smartphone platform worldwide in Q4 2010 with over 300 million Android devices in use by February 2012.According to Google’s Andy Rubin, as of February 2012 there are over 850,000 Android devices activated every day. Google Android Mobile Applications can be downloaded from third-party sites or through online stores such as Google Play, the app store run by Google.
Tabus Nine Computing is currently developing other features to add to the Game of Life Live Wallpaper, including other display modes, and an in-app store where users can purchase palettes and other display modes.
About Tabus Nine
Tabus Nine Computing was founded in 2011 to create Android applications, as well as perform artificial intelligence research by Austin Mueller and Ben Oztalay. Both company founders are Computer Science and Engineering majors at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You can connect with them through various social communities at:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/TabusNineComputing
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/TabusNine
Google+: https://plus.google.com/b/111130699011280790755/
Hey,
Lately, we’ve been working hard to refactor the Game of Life Live Wallpaper’s code. It was, and still is in some places, a serious mess. Going into the code, I’ll encounter things and think, “Six constructors? Does this really need six constructors? Why is this static, what else uses this? This JavaDoc doesn’t make any sense, that is not what that function does”. It’s humbling to remember that I wrote that code at some point, and thought it was a pretty good solution.
Since reading Clean Code by Robert Martin, we’ve been much more aware in general when we write code. Based on what the code looked like before, we had a rather narrow focus when writing code. Each part might look alright, but when you zoom out and look at how all of the code fits together, instead of the entire project being a big, shiny jewel, it’s a haphazard conglomeration of grains of sand.
So, with these new ideas in mind, we’ve been reworking the code into something much more coherent and less buggy. In the process, we’ve been learning quite a bit about how we should write code, as well as how to refactor bad code. We completely rewrote the core of the wallpaper that handles the Game of Life and how it’s rendered on the screen. Now, we’re working on the settings menus and all of the pieces that go into that. It’s difficult to find a nice, clean solution to getting the live wallpaper and the settings menus to communicate, since they act as completely separate programs on the phone.
We’re getting close to the end. The next update to the Game of Life Live Wallpaper will likely be more internal than external, but we also have a fairly large functional update for it in the works.
Ben Oztalay
COO and Co-Founder
Lite Game Of Life Wallpaper Has hit its 1000th download!
Sorry we haven’t been updating this as much… We have been really busy with contract work recently so there hasn’t been much time for creating new apps. We do have some great ideas in the pipeline though.
Austin Mueller
CTO and Co-Founder
Hey,
Lately, we’ve been working on several things. Mainly, we’ve been setting up all sorts of accounts on different social networking and distribution sites to get the word out about us. We’ve just added a press room to our website, and released our first press release about Modulus.
On the subject of Modulus, we just changed it up a bit. Now, all of the Puzzles and Challenges, as well as Free Play mode, are available in Modulus Lite, but there are also ads. If you’d like to treat yourself to an ad-free Modulus experience, you can purchase the full version.
Work on the Game of Life Live Wallpaper’s new GUI and Palette Store continues, as well as restructuring some of the messier code. We’re also considering making the Game of Life Live Wallpaper free for a week or so, as a promotion.
Also, our business cards came in last week, so that was fun to get.
Ben Oztalay
COO and Co-Founder
Hey,
So, today we got a couple of crash reports for the Game of Life Live Wallpaper, and we’re happy to say that both of the bugs were fixed within two hours of the reports coming in!
Also, we’ve decided to put some more work into the Game of Life Live Wallpaper before we move on to other projects. The first thing we’re adding is an in-app palette store! You’ll be able to purchase packs of four or five regular Palettes and Time Palettes for your live wallpaper. We’re still working out the details on this.
We made some progress on this front tonight. We successfully loaded a palette from our server! This means we’ll be able to hold all of the palettes on our server and put new palettes up there as we create new ones, so there’ll always be fresh palettes in the store for you to check out.
In other news, we have our mobile website up and running, as well as our RSS feed. And, as you may have noticed, the social networking buttons are now on individual posts, so you can share individual posts!
Ben Oztalay
President and Founder
Hey,
We’ve been messing around with getting our posts to automatically go out to Twitter and Facebook, so if you notice some weird stuff happening, it’s because of that.
And Twitter works now! Other stuff we’re working on tonight include many of the items mentioned in the previous few posts.
Ben Oztalay
President and Founder
Hey,
So, today we’ve been working more on revamping our websites, Facebook, Twitter, and the like. We changed our Facebook page‘s URL, and we’ll be changing our Twitter page over the weekend. We’ll be putting together a mobile website, and providing a link to our website from within our apps, to make it more accessible. Our RSS feed should be all set to go soon, as well.
We also changed the screenshots and description for the Lite version of the Game of Life Live Wallpaper, as they were inaccurate, which we apologize for. We overlooked the copying and pasting, which resulted in the Lite version’s screenshots and description being 90% for the paid version, which is misleading, and we have since fixed that. The updates will be live on the Android Market soon.
In other news, we’ve come up with a new app idea! But we think we’re going to be keeping it under wraps for the time being.
Ben Oztalay
President and Founder
Hey,
So, today we’re putting together business cards, we probably should have done that a long time ago. I”ll put the design up at the end of this post.
We’re currently in between projects right now, and we’re trying to come up with an idea for another app (if you have any suggestions, let us know!). We have a few options, like a pocket reference for a few programming languages, or a widget that opens up your live wallpaper’s settings menu. We’ve also been thinking about some sort of utility app… not sure on the details, though. Or we could try our hands at a game.
Other than that, we’re reorganizing a bit and looking more into marketing our apps.
Ben Oztalay
President and Founder
We made it onto LiveWallpapers.org! AND, bonus, we are the #1 rated live wallpaper on the whole website!!
Today we are working on more updates to Modulus, Game of Life Live Wallpaper, and the website. For Modulus and Game of Life Live Wallpaper we are going to implement a ‘rate this app’ reminder system in the hopes that more people might submit ratings, so that we can get closer to the top of relevant searches. For the website, we are just doing more social media tie-ins.
Also, we made a Google+ page!
Relatively short update today, definitely no shortage of work though.
-Austin Mueller
President and Founder.
Social Widgets powered by AB-WebLog.com.
