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500 Firepaper v2.00 has just been released! The official changelog is fairly extensive, so let me just elaborate on the main points here.

Cooperation with *500px for Pro*

The 24 hour cache time limit imposed by 500px API terms and conditions may lead to a lack of images being shown when you've been away from Wi-Fi for a while.

In cooperation with 500px, the in-app purchase to upgrade to Pro will now allow images to be cached for up to 7 days !

While this by itself may not mean much for some users, this has now also allowed me to implement a 'pin' (pause) feature. From the History Browser, you can now select any image and pin it to your background for up to 7 days ! 

To the best of my knowledge, 500 Firepaper is currently the only app that can legally do this.

Of course, three-finger tapping the screen will still progress to the next image as usual.

It is entirely possible that we'll see more features in cooperation with 500px in the near future.

History Browser overhaul

Because 'pinning' will no doubt be a popular feature, and is done through the History Browser, it will be taking up a more prominent position in the app. Triple tapping the background in your home screen will now open the History Browser instead of opening 500px (you can still go there with an additional press of a button, though).

Being more prominent also means it has to work better, so quite some effort was spent improving it. It now features swipe-based navigation and animations; layouts have been further tuned for various screen-sizes and orientations; image loading has been further optimized - the list goes on.

Experimental hardware acceleration added

As many have requested, I have implemented hardware acceleration. I'm still calling it experimental (and it is thus disabled by default) because even though it works on all the devices I've tested it on, I'm sure there'll be some failures on some device somewhere. Furthermore, there are some caveats to using hardware acceleration.

A group of (relatively minor) issues are due to how hardware accelerated live wallpapers need to be implemented. I won't bore you with the nitty gritty, but it comes down to that Android doesn't really support it (for shame!), and some major hoops need to be jumped through to make it work at all. There are some visible(!) side-effects to this approach. I'm not going to specifically point these out, as most of these are of the class that if you've been made aware of them, they will forever annoy you each time you see a hardware accelerated live wallpaper.

Additionally, it certainly uses more memory than working non-accelerated, and I'm not completely sure about the battery impact. I've received quite a bit of praise on how little battery 500 Firepaper uses compared to a number of other popular wallpapers. While that is of course how I intended it to be, 500 Firepaper not using hardware acceleration may also be of relevance in that area. Or it may not - at this point I don't know, and I can see arguments to defend both positions.

Miscellaneous changes

You can now set a default image to use when 500 Firepaper runs out of images to display - so you will no longer be presented with the black screen with the warning text.

The caching algorithms have been completely reworked, which should better distribute the caching of images throughout the day, and reduce the likelyhood of you running into the 'no images to display' screen. The app also tries harder to clear up this issue if it should present itself, and checks this periodically.

Touch handling code has been reworked. I wouldn't normally specifically mention this, but some users have contacted me about issues in combination with GMD Gesture Control - this has changed.

There's even more, but not everything is worth writing about.

In closing ...

The link to download 500 Firepaper can be found in the box below.

The discussion thread on XDA can be found here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2522588

I hope you enjoy the update, and thank you all for your continued support!