April fools in December?

I was hacking away last night to rewrite Wallpaper Slideshow, and I needed to reference a java file in the Android source code. I noticed the file had changed, and that a new commit had been made. The Gingerbread was done baking before the timer went off, which it did this morning with Andy Rubin's big announcement.

So on my lunch break today I thought I would upgrade to the latest SDK and spoil my dinner with some tasty new Google treats. The good thing is my applications work wonderfully, the bad thing is, this must be some kind of joke.

Here is a screenshot of the upcoming Wallpaper Slideshow settings screen in Froyo (spoiler alert, be warned):



Looks normal, and has looked the same since API level 3. Now Google hired some big name user interface designers for Gingerbread to give it a new fresh look, so I was pretty excited to try it in action. Imagine then my shock and dismay when I was greeted with the following screen:



Yes folks, THIS IS GINGERBREAD. And that doesn't even show the worst of it, the buttons, the menus, the widgets and my personal least favorite, the progress bar, all look extremely horrible. Overall the entire OS has a flat, black, pixelated and blurry look to it. It is just unbelievable in the worst sense of the word.

I can only hope that this is not a final release, that the emulator lacks some required hardware video acceleration, or Google is just playing a joke on us because this is outright atrocious. Now I will reserve full judgement until I have a Nexus S in my hand, but if this is the way it's intended to look, be ready for some well deserved ridicule from the community.

UPDATE:

Ok, so my emulator was using MDPI resources instead of HDPI. When increasing the pixel density it actually looks 100x better. I'm still not really a fan of the widgets, or the transparent options menu, but it's no where as bad as I thought initially... at least not for HDPI. I hope lower resolutions won't suffer the same pixelation as we see in the emulator, but I do look forward to the day when I can test this out on a real device.

Wallpaper Slideshow for Android

Wallpaper Slideshow for Android on AppBrain

Following the success of my Gnome Wallpaper Slideshow for Linux, this was one of my first Android projects. The beta was originally uploaded to the Market on October 28 2010. Today I am happy to announce the beta tag has been removed and version 1.0 of Android Wallpaper Slideshow is now available to download FREE from the Android Market.



Android Wallpaper Slideshow allows you to select a folder from your SD card that will be cycled through at a user defined interval. Pictures are scaled and cropped as needed to fill your screen in either portrait or landscape modes while preserving aspect ratio. Images are transitioned with a nice fade effect. You can optionally select to display the images in random order instead of file order. And you can select to rotate the images to match your screen orientation. Your SD card is automatically recursively scanned for all folders containing images from which you can choose from. Hidden folders, folders containing only an AlbumArt.jpg file and folders containing a .nomedia file will not be available for selection.

Wallpaper Slideshow on AppBrain

Wallpaper Slideshow is open source, visit the project page at http://code.google.com/p/android-wallpaper-slideshow/