SlideScreen 1.1 Released

by Matt Hall on Android /

After a bit of an extended testing period, SlideScreen 1.1 has been released to the market. This is a pretty big release, so here’s the change list:

Facebook! You can now load your Facebook news stream and view entries in the built in reader. Thanks to FBConnect Android (http://code.google.com/p/fbconnect-android/) for the Faceook login support.
Google Reader upgrades:

Move [...]

SlideScreen released!

by Matt Hall on Android /

A couple rewrites and 17 beta versions later, our home screen replacement SlideScreen is finally live in the Android Market! If you haven’t read about the app before check out the product page to see what it’s about, or read our original blog post about the ideas behind the design. The reviews have started coming [...]

Intelligent Home Screen Demo and Beta

by Matt Hall on Android /

If you want to see our Intelligent Home Screen in action, we’re going to be demoing it at the NY Tech Meetup this Tuesday. It’s a big and exciting meeting (the last time I was there I heard Dan Bricklin speak) so hopefully we’ll find some like minded people there.
The other big news is we’ll also [...]

October Update

by Matt Hall on Android / LarvaLabs /

Sorry about the lack of posts this month, things got busy and the updates suffered. So I’ll try to get everything in this one update.
Android Market Sales
Since our last post on Android sales numbers the new market client in Android 1.6 has rolled out to most users (we think). The new client prominently features the [...]

Android Home Screen Design (with Video)

by Matt Hall on Android /

(If you want to skip the details below, you can go straight to the video and features list on the product page).
In previous posts we’ve talked about how, despite some growing pains, we thought Android looked very interesting as a phone platform in the medium to long term. That’s definitely starting to take shape with recent [...]

Interview on the NewsHour

by Matt Hall on Android / LarvaLabs / Sidekick / iPhone /

Our company was interviewed as part of a larger piece on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. We didn’t get a ton of airtime, but it was definitely cool to be on the show. The only problem with the piece is they said I wrote all our apps, sorry about that John! For the record John [...]

Android Market Sales Follow-Up

by John Watkinson on Android / iPhone /

We have received a lot of interesting feedback from our post regarding the poor overall sales in the Android market to date. Here is a follow-up on some of the comments:
Market Overhaul
It is encouraging to see some early screenshots of what appears to be a significant Android Market Overhaul. Most notably, there is a “Top [...]

Android Market Sales, Are Those Tears or is it Raining in Here?

by Matt Hall on Android / iPhone /

There’s been a lot of speculation lately about the size of the Apple App Store, most recently based on some numbers from AdMob which are summarized over at GigaOM. They came to the conclusion that the app store is worth $200M monthly, whereas the Android market is worth a paltry $5M. As sad as that [...]

We’re nominated!

by Matt Hall on Android /

A whole bunch of Android sites got together and nominated their favorite apps on the platform, and they picked Retro Defense as one of the top games! So if you like Retro Defense go ahead and vote right here, or go check out the whole list.
Update: We didn’t win, but the open-path tower defense game [...]

Retro Defense Level Design

by Matt Hall on Android /

We’ve had a number of requests for a level editor for Retro Defense, and while we don’t quite have the time at the moment to do something like that, we’d love to see what kind of levels people out there would dream up. So, as a little experiment I’m going to post the level format [...]