Monday, July 24, 2017

My First Mobile App — Active Wallpaper

The picture on the right gave me the idea for my first Mobile App, so consider this as me just “planting a seed”…
The idea came to me after I bought my first Android SmartPhone. I wanted to come up with a fitting wallpaper for my Pixel, so I did a little graphics editing to put the name of my men's team on a favorite ice climbing picture. And then there was a little whitespace on the cloud, so I wrote in one of our team standards that really speaks to me (and which also goes well with the picture itself) — "Quitting Is Not An Option". Alas, this also was me editing the graphics, so what you see on the right is really just an annotated photo  — your typical Still Wallpaper.
But like most men's teams, we have more than one phrase that describes how we want to be, so I lamented the 'fact' that you can only put one such phrase on a graphic, and that led me to ask: Why can't we change that to be a more Active space — put an App behind it, and have the App cycle thru a set of Phrases … ? — So in the same picture the Phrase changes and you would see e.g. :
The App is very much like ordinary wallpaper except that it wakes up every once in a while to change the picture slightly — by over-writing a different Phrase on a pre-determined Marquis space on the picture…

So this suggests to me a WPF or Xamarin App that (somehow?) gets all the metadata it needs to come up with the picture — along with the collection of Phrases, placement, fonts, and etc. And then when you run the App, what you see is  “Active Wallpaper”.

Details about when and how this might materialize for Mobile are TBS … but click here for details about an “Active Wallpaper” prototype that I created using MVC, JavaScript and AJAX, Sql, WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), and The Cloud — as a first step towards the Mobile App. (The WPF version runs only on Windows.)