Wednesday 19 October 2011

Noisy Coloured Llamas

This week I've been teaching Llama how to make noises. You can now select a Play a Sound action that will play a ringtone, notification tone or a piece of music.

I've also changed the way Llama handles its notification icons. The colours and number of dots are now separated, so you can have 'blue with 3 dots' and 'yellow with 1 dot'. This means you can use the dots to represent the volume of a profile and the colour to represent some other state. Since the icon drawing has changed, it also means that the profile lock icon displays as an overlay on top of the current profile, so you can see what the current profile is.

Unfortunately, Android requires each combination of colour and dot to be defined (thankfully not as a bitmap, using LayerDrawables). This means that I can't do stuff like yellow Llama, with 2 blue dots and 1 pink dot. Currently, there are 5 different numbers of dots and 10 Llama colours, as well as a locked and unlocked state. This means there are:

5*10*2 = 100 variations

If the dots could change colour too, there'd be about 1000 combinations. If each individual dot could change colour then there'd be a bigger number than I want to think about. I'll experiment with this day, but it might cause havoc.

The Llama notification icon action and profiles have been updated to let you change the number of dots and/or the colour of the Llama. You existing profiles and actions will behave as they did before. e.g. black/white with whatever number of dots, or coloured with no dots.

Anyways, the new version is here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?w37e8er44uqebe7

As usual, backup your settings before you install this version, just in case you encounter problems and have to return to the market version.