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March 13th, 2012
11:19 pm - Busy times - Paris, Milan, and Dubai
Life's been kinda crazy lately... Work has already sent me on two trips so far - slightly less than 2 weeks split between Paris and Milan, and about a week in Dubai.
Paris was great - Got a Saturday off there, and managed to meet up with Toby and Andrew, so we saw (a small subset of) the Louvre, the grand and petite palaces, the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel tower, Monmartre, and a bunch of other things. Milan was also pretty interesting - I hadn't been to either place before, so even without a lot of time to explore, it was good... And so much good food in both cities.
The flight *back* from Paris on one of the nice new A380's was particularly exciting - about 3 hours out, I started to smell a very strong smell of burnt plastic. Shortly after that I saw a bunch of flight attendants going down the other aisle taking everything out of the overhead bins and looking inside them. Shortly after that the pilot announced that due to a 'technical difficulty' we were returning to Paris. *sigh* Got maybe 4 hours sleep in a hotel, and got back on another plane the next day. Made it back without incident this time.
I also got a bit less than a week in Dubai, which was interesting --- I didn't get that much time to explore, but I did get to check out 'traditional dubai', including the spice, gold and textile markets, which were pretty neat to see, and I got a couple of hours to check out the Dubai mall - the largest in the world... Including eating chicken shwarma pizza from Pizza Hut. Overall it was a pretty interesting experience. Long flights though - went via New York (12.5 hours) and came back via Toronto (14.5 hours). At least there were no fires on the flights this time!!!
more work trips coming up around the end of April - Europe for sure for about a week, possibly followed directly by about the same in Las Vegas.
I enjoy being able to travel for work *occasionally*... but this is getting to be ridiculous...
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October 15th, 2011
01:18 am - perhaps not so sad yet...
Sounds like one of the nurses might have pulled the panic switch a bit early --- my dad just called back and said that she was at least not doing any worse than earlier today --- She's far from out of the woods, but I'm at least not checking into flights to Saskatchewan any more...
It's a bit roller-coaster like around here --- but hopefully she'll pull through...
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September 25th, 2011
03:23 pm - Updatey
I've posted a few updates to my existing apps, and one new app over the past month and a half - The new app is similar in style to the previous app I posted about, but it lets you choose from 1 of 5 different images. My plan is to periodically update it with some new images.
My other apps are doing well, but not getting quite as many downloads as I'd hoped --- I have about 3500 downloads across 5 different apps - but about half of those are of the first app I posted.
Lately I've been looking into how to get OpenGL Shaders working - from what I've seen I should be able to have a lot more control over how the layers are blended if I implement my own shader - I'm hoping that will let me produce images in a way much closer to what I can do in the Gimp.
One of the challenges I've had is that the OpenGL blending modes I've been using produce images that are much more washed out than what I can do in the Gimp - I hope I can change that with the shaders.
This entry was originally posted at http://synergisticimages.dreamwidth.org/2414.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
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July 30th, 2011
01:09 pm - Different style of app --- Image Explorer
Between a vacation in Saskatchewan and a birthday party for my daughter I haven't had too much time to work on the art apps recently - I did manage to create a somewhat different style of app - I'm calling it an image explorer. It takes one of my pieces of art and basically moves the camera around over it - zooming in and out. I think it works pretty well with my art since it lets you see some of the fine detail that is normally hard to see without a very big print-out. I posted the first one this morning based on 1/3 of my Amethyst Cloud triptych
Here's a video of the new app:
Interestingly, even with a month of no updates I've seen a slow but steady stream of downloads. My first app - Iris 3 - is at 950 downloads now, and FrozenRainbow is approaching 600 downloads... still not a lot of purchases - a total of 5 so far, but more interesting, is that even without any updates to the apps in the last month, I saw about 2x as many hits on my photo website than I do in a 'normal' month...
We'll see how the new app does - if it seems successful I'll create more similar ones from other artwork. The limited factor will be that Google has a very strict 'no nudity' policy for the android market - so a far bit of artwork is out. :-( I might have to see if there's an alternative market that might work. The Amazon market only has a 'no porn' policy --- but it's only available to US citizens so far...
This entry was originally posted at http://synergisticimages.dreamwidth.org/2275.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
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June 29th, 2011
11:52 pm - Third App!
I finished my third app last weekend and posted it Saturday night - I'm calling it "Frozen Rainbow" - I've had over 300 downloads of it so far, which I figure is pretty good. I've also seen the downloads of Iris3 grow - I posted a patch about a week ago which caused a spike in downloads, but I'm seeing more downloads trickle in on a day by day basis - it's over 700 downloads now.
I also have 3 sales now of Iris3 - one in Las Vegas, one in Kuwait and one in Japan. Not a lot, but frankly more than I expected at this point --- given that I haven't even added any functionality to the paid version aside from the higher-res images.
Here's a video of the new app... The colors aren't quite as vivid as I'd prefer, but I'm pretty happy with it...
This entry was originally posted at http://synergisticimages.dreamwidth.org/1904.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
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June 14th, 2011
12:16 am - Updated video for Iris 3 App
Since I've figured out a way to create decent videos for my apps, I thought I'd share the updated one from my first app
This entry was originally posted at http://synergisticimages.dreamwidth.org/1544.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
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June 13th, 2011
11:00 pm - Second App!
I've built and just posted a new app --- called "Tulip Child". I also figured out how to convince the wallpaper to dump out a png image for each frame, which makes it a lot easier to create good quality videos... speaking of which, here is a video for the new app:
I decided to try posting the paid version last night *without* the free version, just to see if it had any impact on installs of my *other* free app. Looks like the answer is 'not much' --- I think I picked up a couple of new installs, but not a lot.
I posted the free version tonight, so I should see tomorrow morning a first indication of how it did. I'm curious to see if there's much of a spill-over effect --- if I see more downloads of my first app due to the new app being on the 'just released' page.
I'm working on a 3rd app now, and I think I might end up liking it more than the one I posted tonight. My goal is to have it posted by the end of the week --- we'll see if I manage it.
This entry was originally posted at http://synergisticimages.dreamwidth.org/1531.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
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June 9th, 2011
09:41 pm - 2 days after posting the apps
It seems like Google updates the android developer console only about once a day, around 8am for me - I posted my two apps (paid and free versions) around midnight Tuesday night - The update Tuesday morning had 74 downloads of the free app, and the update this morning had 205 downloads of the free app, and 1 purchase of the paid app. I frankly don't know whether that's good, bad or about average, but I'm reasonably satisfied.
A more interesting data point for me is that traffic on my photo website was also pretty high - I normally only see about 20-30 image views on an average day, but on Wednesday I had 230 views, more than half of which were for the image I link from in the android app - Today there have been 60 views so far, which is still higher than normal, but starting to drop off.
My next steps will be to in parallel start work on a new app based on a different image, and to start adding some new functionality to the app. I'll probably aim to release a new app first, and then release a new version of both apps with some new functionality.
This entry was originally posted at http://synergisticimages.dreamwidth.org/1181.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
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June 8th, 2011
12:44 am - It's Alive!!!
Well, it took a little longer than I hoped, but I have my first apps up on the android market!!
Paid: https://market.android.com/details?id=ca.synergisticimages.Iris3Wallpaper
Free: https://market.android.com/details?id=ca.synergisticimages.Iris3WallpaperFree
If you or someone you know have an android phone or tablet capable of running live wallpapers (you need 2.1 or newer, I think), please check out the free version and let me know what you think - and rate it on the market!
I've also got a slightly higher quality video - recorded via the emulator and a screen-capture tool:
This entry was originally posted at http://synergisticimages.dreamwidth.org/862.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
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June 5th, 2011
02:29 pm - flowers!!
Since most of my "art" time lately has been working on my android app, I haven't been creating new images, but I have been taking some pics to use in my art, and some of them are nice enough that I think they can stand their own,
Here's one of a tulip from our yard. I believe it is a silver fire parrot tulip.
This entry was originally posted at http://synergisticimages.dreamwidth.org/525.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
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