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Dec

[New App] GMD Smart Rotate Copies Samsung's Camera-Based Orientation Control - Perfect For The Frequently Horizontal

Posted by Jeremiah Rice in Applications, News

Does the fact that your smartphone or tablet's orientation control conform to its orientation rather than yours constantly enrage you? Well, you could go buy a late-model Samsung device for its Smart Rotate feature, which uses the front-facing camera to see which way your face is pointing and adjusts the screen accordingly. Or you could download GMD Smart Rotate, which does the exact same thing.

GMD replaces the accelerometer function with facial recognition, meaning that if you hold your phone in portrait mode even when you yourself are horizontal, it will know not to rotate the screen. I can think of exactly one amazingly good use-case scenario: when you're lying on your side and want to read or watch something, and don't have five precious seconds to toggle the auto-rotate function in stock Android.

Nov

[New Game] Noodlecake's Pixel Twist Is A Colorful, Relaxing 'Little Zen Exercise'

Posted by Liam Spradlin in Games, News

Inspired by the popular Flash-based puzzler Coign of Vantage by Bobblebrook (which has also been available as an iOS game for some time), Noodlecake has released their latest creation to the Play Store – Pixel Twist.

The game's listing describes it as "a unique little 'zen exercise'," and it undoubtedly lives up to that billing. The goal of the game is simple – rotate a cloud of pixels until it matches a specified image. Each image is a pixelated version of some object like a tree, or an apple, or the moon. At the beginning of each stage, the player is greeted by an ethereal cluster of floating cubes which can then be rotated in any direction to match the image.

May

Google Finally Updates Web Android Market With Screenshot Navigation And Rotation Capabilities

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Apps/Games, News

Last Updated: May 29th, 2011

Ever since the Android web Market was launched, one of my main gripes with its UI (let's not talk about content discovery here) was screenshot navigation. There were 2 basic problems - you could not click Next or Previous as those buttons did not exist, and the only way to close a screenshot close-up was by finding and clicking a tiny X button.

Most modern "lightbox"-style galleries already solved the aforementioned problems by adding easy navigation buttons and allowing you to click anywhere on the screen to dismiss the close-up. Today, Google quietly did just that, and then some.

Here are the 5 new features I just spotted that weren't there this morning:

the Next and Previous buttons finally allow easy navigation
clicking on the close-up of a screenshot is equivalent to pressing Next
left and right keyboard arrow keys are equivalent to Previous and Next (hooray!)
the X button is gone - you can now close any image close-up by clicking anywhere on the screen
in-line rotation buttons which let you turn those occasional sideways images the right way

Here, have a look:

Visit your favorite app in the Market and check it out for yourself.

Jan

Launcher Pro Updated With Homescreen Transition Effects [Video]

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, Development, News, Videos

Launcher Pro, my favorite launcher replacement, got updated today with a much requested feature - homescreen transition animations, available to all LP users, not just Plus. In addition to the usual and very smooth slide effect, we now have 4 more: Scale, Rotate, Flip, and Cube. All are smooth, except for the Cube transition, so I would advise against using it until Fede makes it a bit more snappy. Out of 5 transitions (including the regular slide), my favorite is definitely Flip. What's yours?