Dice 2.1 is out - and it's faster than ever!

We just pushed in an update to our fabulous Fantasy Dice!

The most important treat is that this release takes the performance to a totally new level. As an example, on Samsung Galaxy S3 you could have four dice running at full speed (FPS60) - now it's nine. We have more than doubled the performance. Thanks go to our optimizing guru Kine, who's done a fantastic job here.

We've also got some good news for Nexus 7 owners: Fantasy Dice 2.1 now fully supports this device. It took some time to get a hold on one here in Oulu, Finland - but now score counting and that great mirror effect work perfectly also on Nexus 7.

Happy dice bouncing - the update should become available in a few hours via Google Play.

We give you: Fantasy Dice 2.0

We have just released a major update to the amazing Fantasy Dice! Our die casting virtuosos Kine and Antti have been pushing long hours for several weeks to give it both a face-lift and new features. Here are some highlights of the milk and honey that come along version 2.0:

New glossy surface and shadows make the 3D effect even more realistic, especially when dice become airborne.

New marble theme with reflection effect - yum yum!

All gamers, ahoy! Total score display has arrived.

We dare to say that with these updates Fantasy Dice becomes one of the best die casting apps in Google Play. Go get the update and enjoy, it's still completely FREE. And stay tuned, more updates are coming.

3D Gyro Compass v. 1.1 is out (and so is 1.11 and 1.12)

We've just released our first update to our popular 3D Gyro Compass app! This update brings you graphical improvements, better compass algorithm, and some bug fixes. 

For example, in the adventure mode the compass rings are now made of pure gold - a highly appreciated feature for all the archaeologists in the jungles of Amazon looking for the great treasures of the Incas. And do not worry, Mr. Jones, despite the high price of gold the app is still FREE.

Compass algorithm has also been improved. It should now work well in areas where magnetic vector is mostly perpendicular to the surface of the Earth, i.e. the Northern and Southern parts of the planet.

More updates are planned, so stay tuned.

UPDATE:
We received our first 1-star review just after the update to version 1.1 :( This user was having texture problems with Nexus 7, and wishing for faster start-up time.

So we went back to optimizing our package. We managed to reduce .apk size 35%, and boost start-up time from 20 seconds to just 6 s. The first start where you accept the EULA is special and still somewhat slow, but after that start-up time shouldn't be a problem anymore. Texture bugs are more difficult to address, especially when we don't have Nexus 7 devices yet and all our test phones seem to draw everything just fine. We'll have to come back to this when we have a device that shows the texture bug.

2ND UPDATE:
Nexus 7 devices became available on our local gadget shop yesterday, so went and bought one right away to be able to fix the texture bug. After a few hours of tinkering it turned out that the problem wasn't in the texture after all, the compass ball just wasn't lighted - it was plainly sitting in the dark! That was easy to fix. However, we still don't know why the existing lamp in the scene didn't work in Nexus 7 while it works fine in all other devices we have... another hit of Android fragmentation. Guess we'll be buying lots of test devices.

We also noticed that colors in Nexus 7 are quite washed out when compared for example to Galaxy S2. Well, now the adventure compass is coated with 24k gold like a real thing. Back to treasure hunting, then!

Version 1.12 will be available in Google Play shortly.

Updates in the works...

Just to let you know: we are currently preparing updates for our most impressive apps, 3D Gyro Compass and Fantasy Dice. We've been improving both the algorithms and the graphics. Here's a couple of noticeable things that will change:

The compass will perform even better than before, especially at areas not so far from the Earth's magnetic poles (like Oulu, Finland), where the magnetic vector has a large vertical component. This has turned out to be tricky to handle with Madgwick's original algorithm, but we have created a solution that we're pretty happy about.

In the graphics department, we've added shiny surfaces, reflections, new materials etc. The new Fantasy Dice looks better than any other dice app in Google Play! Stay tuned, we'll post teaser screenshots later.


Oh, one more thing. We have a new sensor fusion app! It's not yet ready to be released, but already in a quite good shape. We think that you'll find it pretty impressive when you get it in your hands. Here's a teaser screenshot so you can start guessing what is it all about (hint: we've licensed the image from 360cities.net):

Sensor fusion algorithm

We have been happy to receive many queries about the sensor fusion algorithm. While it is based on Sebastian Madgwick's work and his original version can be downloaded from here, we have also made available our own slightly modified version (as required by the LGPL license).

Due to the number of queries, we have now moved from email support to direct downloads, i.e. we are now hosting the file on our web servers and you download it directly from here.

Nevertheless, we'd really like to hear about you, so don't hesitate to drop a line by email (info[at]finwe.fi) or by commenting here.

AI apps updated

We have just pushed in update release for each AI app. Here's the changelog:

1.1.0 Feature update
- Added widget initialization from history
- Added widget overlay icons
- Increased widget text size
- Widget graphics & layout updated
- Minor bug fixes

In addition to this, Web AI has also much improved bookmark icon downloading algorithm and better icon graphics (when supported by websites).

New versions will be available in Google Play shortly.

Update: Installation packages now available.

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.

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.

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.

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.