tiistai 25. syyskuuta 2012

Fantasy Dice is finally out!



We're so pleased to announce that Fantasy Dice is finally released!

Our last few tweaks were worth it, it now supports much more devices and has better performance overall.

This is in fact the third dice app from our sensor team. Two previous ones were technology demos made for key customers years ago, and not publicly available. Hence, we are very exited to reveal this FREE app for everyone to download and have fun with! Share freely and let us here what you think about it.


Update: Video changed to newer one.

Get it on Google Play

torstai 20. syyskuuta 2012

Fragmentation!

So we too fell for this one. I guess it had to happen eventually...

We have a bunch of different kinds of Android devices in our lab for development and testing. But, there are hundreds of different devices running different versions of Android, so of course it is impossible to have them all and test each device. Unfortunately, they really do behave differently from software developer's point of view. That's platform fragmentation.

Long story short, after pushing the last update to our AI apps we started to receive bug reports of suddenly missing content from the widgets. It took some time to figure it all out, as none of our development devices had ever showed this behavior. So we went shopping and bought a few Samsung Galaxy S3 phones (yikes, they are expensive!) We then managed to repeat the bug, fixed it, and now there's an update available for each AI app.

Apologies go to all AI apps users. We now have better coverage over various Android devices, so hopefully this will never happen again.

As a bonus, there are new features coming to AI apps. They are not yet included to this "emergency update" released today, since we wanted to get it out as soon as properly tested.

maanantai 10. syyskuuta 2012

Teaser: introducing Fantasy Dice

Our first sensor fusion app, 3D Gyro Compass, has been quite successful: its installed base grows about 10% each day, and it has collected 500+ downloads within two weeks with very little marketing. Not bad at all.

In fact we've been so pleased that we have decided to release another treat from our sensor fusion lab: it's a simple dice rolling app and called Fantasy Dice. As usual, it's got 3D graphics created with Rightware's Kanzi framework and AHRS sensor fusion for movement tracking. However, this time we added Bullet physics engine to create realistic physics simulation! Together these three make a great combo, you'll definitely want to check it out. 

We hope to release it already this week, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, here's a small teaser for you guys...


Update: Well, that week went and there was no release... In fact we had everything ready to go, but then received messages from our beta testers of slow performance in some devices that we don't have at the lab. So we decided to postpone the release, and fix the issues first.

That was a good decision, we now have 60 FPS on many devices, and even slightly older hardware can render a few dice at 30-40 FPS. There are also other improvements, including algorithm bug fixes. The overall user experience is now significantly better.

So we are once again preparing for a release, but this time there will be no schedule given (trying to learn from past mistakes). It will be released when it is... well, ready.

tiistai 4. syyskuuta 2012

AI apps just got better!

Just a quick note: we have now added additional screen layouts (first presented in SMS AI) to Call AI, Start AI and Web AI.

Updates to existing users will be soon available via Google Play.

maanantai 3. syyskuuta 2012

SMS AI published


And here we go again: our fourth AI app, SMS AI, has just been released via Google Play! SMS AI is similar to Call AI, but observes your SMS habits instead of calls. Also, when a contact in the widget is tapped, SMS form will open (instead of contact details view).

What's best, SMS AI is completely FREE and comes without advertisements!

This widget has a new twist that is coming also to our earlier AI releases: you can now choose from 4x1, 4x2 and 2x2 widget layouts. As an example, here's more spacy 4x2 layout:


UPDATE: It is available now, get yours from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fi.finwe.smsai