Tuesday, June 15, 2010

What Color? - Version 1.5 released!

A new version of What Color? was released to the Android Market today. This update brings portrait mode to all phones that have an orientation sensor. The portrait mode works similar to Android 2.2's built in camera app. The shutter and pause buttons are rotated when the camera is rotated into portrait mode.

The pull-out drawer is not yet visible in portrait mode, but I am hoping to enable this in the future. Also, for phones that already had portrait mode enabled (G1, MyTouch, pre Froyo Nexus One) the app will work exactly the same as before.

In addition, full support for Android 2.2 (Froyo) phones has been added. This includes the ability to move the app to SD card and support for the new backup features. The settings of the app will be backed up to Google's cloud backup service automatically.

Finally, there were a few bugs on certain phones (HTC Hero for one) caused by the camera preview failing to restart after going into the Settings Menu. This has been fixed by restarting the camera after a few seconds if it fails to start the first time.

For users of the Samsung Moment: The camera preview format this phone uses (yuv420p) does not comply with the standard format that Google supposedly guarantees to work with all phones (yuv420sp). Therefore, color information on this phone cannot currently be decoded, since it is stored in a different order. Instead you must snap a picture and use Static mode to get color information. I will work on trying to decode this color format, but there is very little information to be found and I have so far had no luck in doing so.