500 Firepaper released
Posted on 2013-11-12, 50 comments, 210 +1's, imported from Google+/Chainfire

NOTICE: This content was originally posted to Google+, then imported here. Some formatting may be lost, links may be dead, and images may be missing.

500 Firepaper provides a live wallpaper and a daydream showing you the latest images from 500px throughout the day. 

You never need to look at that boring old wallpaper again, or search for hours for a nice new one. This app will show you quality photographs from all over the world - different ones each day!

The feature (popular, editor's choice, fresh, etc) and categories displayed are of course configurable, as is the refresh interval and the brightness of the images.

XDA thread is here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2522588

Background

So this really isn't anything special and probably nobody cares about it. But here it is anyway.

I actually started writing something a little bit like this years ago (which was called Firepaper) which had loads of advanced options, but due to Android 2.x and the constant fighting with memory limitations, I never released anything. Then past February I thought about doing something with 500px, and wrote a lot of the code, but for some reason never finished it. This weekend I had some time to spare and didn't feel like working on any of my usual apps, and I was annoyed with the Nexus 5 wallpaper, so I finished this up (this is something I actually want for my own phone).

There's other live wallpapers and daydreams that do similar things. But due to the nature of background syncing, caching and transferring images I didn't really feel like trusting somebody else to get that right, and not drain my battery when I need it most or rake up the data charges. Not that I'm convinced I did it right, but it works for me so far ... :)

+1210
Ridho Ibrahim commented on 2013-11-12 at 12:43:

First!

Robert Hickey commented on 2013-11-12 at 12:47:

This is a cool app. I might try it.

A. Svet commented on 2013-11-12 at 12:48:

I'm afraid of the battery usage…

Stefano Stella commented on 2013-11-12 at 12:50:

I like it very much... Thank you!!! :-)

M Nuruddin Ghazalli commented on 2013-11-12 at 12:53:

[Mispelling] in the settings, under Daydream > Control, the third sentence missed a 'g' in the word fingers.

Ritesh Tripathy commented on 2013-11-12 at 12:54:

50 MB RAM. I was hoping to be wrong, but ...

Ziggy Winnicki commented on 2013-11-12 at 12:55:

Absolutely awesome, thanks +Chainfire for another outstanding app. Really love my nexus even more so now? You've done it again, thanks mate ;-)

Stefano Stella commented on 2013-11-12 at 12:58:

I don't think it drain battery so much... But chainfire can tell us more in detail about that

Phillip Nichols commented on 2013-11-12 at 12:58:

Thanks awesome

Ritesh Tripathy commented on 2013-11-12 at 12:59:

Does changing the Interval to a shorter one consume more battery and/or data?

Ridho Ibrahim commented on 2013-11-12 at 13:00:

Sometimes the scrolling is laggy. Nexus 4. Thanks +Chainfire!

Mihnea Manduteanu commented on 2013-11-12 at 13:01:

I'll try it

Vishal Khedkar commented on 2013-11-12 at 13:03:

Excellent app! I loved it! And yeah, it does use 50 MB of RAM... But I have no issue with that on my Xperia Z

Dan McKellip commented on 2013-11-12 at 13:04:

I'm on a fresh charge. Just installed. WiFi on. I'll update later.

M Nuruddin Ghazalli commented on 2013-11-12 at 13:05:

I think devices with 2GB of RAM or more should be good. Unless you are using Touchwiz...

Reuben Schiff commented on 2013-11-12 at 13:07:

Looking good...

Ritesh Tripathy commented on 2013-11-12 at 13:07:

I have no real issue with it on my Nexus 4 either, just saying that 50 MB for a live wallpaper is a bit too much. Knowing +Chainfire, I expected a little better. Hope he can improve it. I like the app though. Always wanted to try something like this but every app that did anything similar was either buggy, too heavy on the battery or outright didn't work. This is the first one that looks like its working fine. Just the memory usage needs to be tamed.

jonathan capellan commented on 2013-11-12 at 13:11:

Wonderful ! Great job CF

Mihnea Manduteanu commented on 2013-11-12 at 13:14:

I guess it should be great for my note 3

Enis Ademi commented on 2013-11-12 at 13:36:

A little laggy on my nexus 4 with cm10.2

Chainfire commented on 2013-11-12 at 13:39:

+M Nuruddin Ghazalli there's already an update uploaded to Google Play that corrects this. It'll take a few hours for Google Play to start distributing it, though

Chainfire commented on 2013-11-12 at 13:41:

Regarding laggy scrolling/fading, it's currently not hardware accelerated. That's on the list to someday add, but it's not a priority and I have other stuff to do. That being said, the latest update (v1.03) does have the option to disable the parallax effect, which should get rid of the laggyness while scrolling.

Chainfire commented on 2013-11-12 at 13:43:

Regarding battery and data use, you are downloading high-res imagery, which is not small. By default it'll do that when on Wi-Fi, and when your battery is >= 50% (or charging). It will batch-cache images, so if all goes well it'll be dowloading images only for a few minutes total each day, usually in one or two goes.

Chainfire commented on 2013-11-12 at 13:54:

+Ritesh Tripathy I'm not sure what you expect here. Just being able to draw these high-res images requires several buffers for performance reasons, which on a high-res devices (which are the target for the app) will take up to 48MB for just that (a bit more on a Nexus 10 even).

If you have the daydream running as well, worst case, double that. Add some Dalvik and other code and logic, and 50-100MB becomes a very likely memory use.

But fear not, when the device is getting low on memory, and the wallpaper/daydream isn't visible, most of that memory is released and not re-allocated until something has to be displayed again.

Either way, I'm not really fond of your negative tone and the assumption that all memory, data, and power use is shit and not thought about at all. That and discussions like these are better fitted to the XDA thread.

Chris N commented on 2013-11-12 at 14:01:

Thank you chainfire

Brad Mackney commented on 2013-11-12 at 14:03:

+Ritesh Tripathy we look forward to your release of a better app.

+Ridho Ibrahim I thought that 'first' bullshit died already.

Overall, these comments look like xda right here.

Mo Yo commented on 2013-11-12 at 14:09:

Good job +Chainfire! Let people do their talk. You know what you do, most of us know how good you do your work. Haters gonna hate...

Ritesh Tripathy commented on 2013-11-12 at 14:17:

+Chainfire I wasn't being negative or trying to put the app down. That was not my intention at all. Like I said, I really like the app. I was just hoping it would be frugal on resources. But thanks for clearing that up about why it uses the amount of resources it does. I've been a big fan of your work for a long time, so maybe I was (unfairly) expecting a bit too much.

+Brad Mackney Cool! Except that I'm not an app developer. Have you never brought up an issue with anything? If you have an issue with Google Search for example, do you run and build a better search engine yourself? I have explained what I meant and that is all.

Étienne Quesselaire commented on 2013-11-12 at 14:30:

Please do that for Linux too :)

Philipp Lichtenberger commented on 2013-11-12 at 15:00:

Love it!!!

Raza Qadri commented on 2013-11-12 at 15:34:

+Chainfire this would really be my choice for wallpaper if you could add 24 hours change interval

Robert Reed commented on 2013-11-12 at 15:56:

Sounds pretty cool I might try it out :)

Robert Reed commented on 2013-11-12 at 16:09:

This is a awesome app many live wallpaper to choose from it so cool

Amon RA commented on 2013-11-12 at 16:41:

+Chainfire Awesome app! It would be nice if we could favorite/save wallpapers, just in case you really like a certain wallpaper.

Shaun Zitzmann commented on 2013-11-12 at 16:42:

+Chainfire Awesome so far! Love all the options. I do think having the ability to choose all the way up to 24 hours would be nice for some people though.

Jose Angel Galvez commented on 2013-11-12 at 16:48:

+Chainfire love the way it changes wallpapers with three fingers. Looking forward for the HW acceleration. Donating.

Shiv Manas commented on 2013-11-12 at 17:00:

+Chainfire Love this app, thank you so much!

Would it be possible to have an option where the image pans/scrolls around on its own? (like how album art is displayed in Google Music) Also, when switching between images, could you add a fade effect so it fades into the new image without showing a black screen? Thanks!

Johnny Allison commented on 2013-11-12 at 17:49:

+Chainfire

Nude photo toggle does not appear to be working.

Needless to say this should be categorized as a major "show-stopping" defect...

Dave Kerr commented on 2013-11-12 at 18:23:

Thanks for all u do for us less talented folk that love to mod our phones!!!

Denver Lobo commented on 2013-11-12 at 19:57:

I really like this +Chainfire! The brightness slider is genius. It would be cool if we could also get an option to slightly blur the wallpaper. Or a blur slider. Slightly blurred wallpapers really make the icons pop.

Ridho Ibrahim commented on 2013-11-12 at 23:00:

+Brad Mackney No, no. Not yet. ?

Nihon Jp commented on 2013-11-13 at 00:01:

+Chainfire  i think you should make a statement about Vroot + KingoRoot since i believe many people will listen to you :)

Davide Ficano commented on 2013-11-13 at 09:12:

is this application closed source?

Muhammad Ridhwan FILLCO commented on 2013-11-13 at 10:20:

This really,?

Or Carmi commented on 2013-11-13 at 14:06:

+Chainfire This is a great app! I would really like to see a feature that would enable to limit the size of downloaded content as currently it start to fill up quite nicely :)

Joshua Jackson commented on 2013-11-13 at 16:59:

+Chainfire Rlly cool app! No lag what so ever on my Moto X. Great job!

B. Kasper commented on 2013-11-13 at 19:08:

+Amon RA: /data/data/eu.chainfire.firepaper.fivehundredpx/files... Add a .jpg extension... Oops - was I not supposed to say that..?

Great app, btw... Thank you for your continued impressive work, +Chainfire

dedy pramono commented on 2013-11-15 at 04:14:

Love this so much! +Chainfire can this also automatically update the lock screen wall paper? Since use GS4, and its doesnt change my lock screen. Thanks

Vikram Mohan commented on 2013-11-16 at 09:38:

+Chainfire this live wallpaper is just amazing, could you consider providing a feature to save these wallpapers as images. Thanks and appreciate your contribution to the community. 

Karl C commented on 2013-11-18 at 15:07:

+Chainfire Great Job! It works flawlessly on my Moto X. People sometimes don't understand that the more features they want on their device, the more sacrifices they'll make in terms of battery or performance. I haven't experienced any noticeable performance/data/battery hit, and I know that you'll be dedicated to keep those at the top of your list as you improve the product. Anyway, great job, keep it up. I wrote a review in the Play Store, I said that this is an app that really does shine and makes iOS converts like me, smile with delight.

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