Need animator for homescreen project

[Guest SpaceRain]

All right, nedge2k and I have been spending some time working on an animated homescreen, but we've run into a huge problem, which ironically doesn't have anything to do with technical issues: We simply aren't creative enough.

We need someone who have good ideas for what would look good, preferably someone who can animate in Macromedia Flash or another program, since that will make it a lot easier to pass your design ideas to us. Ideally you will create an animated homescreen in Flash or whatever, we will go "wow, that looks awesome" and we will then create the homescreen using your design and animations. Like I said, Flash would probably be the easiest, but if you can animate in something else, that will work too, we just need to be able to "see" what it's supposed to look like.

The technology:

* The homescreen is only active when the backlight is on and there are no other windows on the screen and it runs in a low-priority thread. This means that the homescreen doesn't affect the speed of the phone or other applications and the battery doesn't get used up any faster than usual. As soon as you switch to another application, Windows sends the homescreen a "sleep" message and then we don't do ANYTHING until we get a "wake up" message. We also have full control of the memory allocations, so we won't be eating up anymore memory than absolutely necessary.

* The speed is excellent, I did a simple animated "The Matrix" homescreen, which simply shows Matrix characters running down in the background of the screen like in the movies with a big "The Matrix" logo and the regular homescreen plugins drawn semi-transparently on top, fading in when activated, and it ran at upwards of 40 fps, which can even be increased through further optimizations. Due to the thread being low-priority as mentioned above, you could, however, visually see the moving characters slowing down when the phone was doing something else, like when another application or the system needed to process something. This can be changed by giving the thread higher priority, but I think most people would agree that if the phone is doing something important, it's better to spend its CPU cycles on whatever that is instead of some eye candy on the homescreen. :)

* All of our code is written in C++ and doesn't require .NET, so it works on Smartphone 2002 too.

As for what we can put on the screen, here's what we can do so far:

* Use and animate any existing plugin in our homescreen. That means we can, at runtime, move plugins around, resize/rescale them, rotate them, mirror them or take them apart. So stuff like the icons in the ICONBAR plugin can be separated from each other, meaning we can use them as semi-transparent objects in a corner of the screen on top of an animated background or whatever. In other words, we have complete control of the output of any plugin, so if your design needs the MRU plugin to be vertical at the left side of the screen with up/down switching apps and right moving to the other plugins on the screen, we can do that. If you need the 10 most recently used program icons in a circle in the middle of the screen rotating when selected or sliding back or forth or whatever, that's no problem either. Once again, we can basically do anything with the "display surface" of a plugin that we want to.

* We have full control of 256 alpha transparency levels, which means any pixel in any object on the screen can be anything from completely transparent to completely opaque. We can of course manipulate this at runtime in any way we want, which we've so far used for making plugins less transparent when they're selected and showing semi-transparent logos on top of an animated background, but I'm sure there's better uses for it.

* Draw stuff on the screen... any stuff. Basically, anything that can be done in, say, Flash, we can do on the screen. If your design needs yellow, semi-transparent boxes flying around and stuff sliding across the screen, we can draw it, we just need someone who can tell us where yellow semi-transparent boxes should be flying to make it look good. :) Right now I'm using an animated homescreen we've made which shows pictures of girls and fades from one picture to the next every 5 seconds and the plugins are drawn (again, semi-transparently, since blue stuff, transparency and sliding stuff are our favority three things) :) on top of this, but while these girls are pretty to look at, the whole concept really isn't very original. :) When I see some of the stuff that people can create in Flash, I'm sure someone can come up with something much, much more creative.

* Play sounds. While I would personally turn them off in about 4 seconds, there's nothing stopping us from including them for the people who think it would be cool.

Here's what we won't do yet:

* Remove or animate the Start button and the Contacts button at the bottom of the screen. Technically there's actually nothing stopping us from doing these things, but the Contacts button works in different ways if you have unread SMS, missed calls, etc., so if we take out that functionality, we'll need to add it somewhere else. For now, we've decided to focus on the rest of the screen, the 176x200 pixels above those buttons. This might change later, but for now we've decided to leave those two buttons alone.

* Animate other screens than the homescreen. This can also be done, but we've decided to focus on the main homescreen for now.

* Code stuff that doesn't really have anything to do with this. That means that while we COULD make the homescreen send an SMS to a certain number whenever something happened or whatever, we really don't wanna. This is not about adding extra functionality to the phone, this is about making a really cool, animated homescreen. Let's deal with that first, then we can look at the other stuff later. :)

And here's what we can't do:

* Show movies. I really don't wanna write or even implement a DivX decoder or whatever. There's already some excellent applications for this, attempting to compete with them wouldn't leave much time for anything else. If your design really needs a movie to run in the background, there are ways to convert it so I can read it easily, but the compression won't be nearly as good as "real" video decoders.

Anything else? Oh, we're not gonna make any money on this. We need you to join this project, because you think it's cool. We have jobs and do this in our spare time and we don't really want anyone's money. The downside to animated homescreens is that they're difficult to customize until someone makes a full-featured animation studio for Smartphone homescreens and/or everyone learns to code. I don't really see either happening anytime soon, but this does give the advantage that your design will be very difficult to steal, so you're not gonna find another version of your animated homescreen floating around on the net with only your name changed.

The animated homescreens we've done so far won't be released yet, since, well, my graphics suck and the stuff we have that uses nedge2k's graphics isn't finished yet, but of course we wouldn't expect anyone to help us with design without examples of what we can do, so if you're interested, we can send you what we have so far, so you can test it out on your own phone.

Long post? I'm sorry, I just think it's only fair if people know what we do and what we don't, before they join the project.

If you have ideas and can animate stuff so it looks cool, send me a PM here or come talk to me in #smartphone, where I can be found most of the day (or night, my sleeping schedule is seriously messed up right now) if you're interested in joining our little animated homescreen project. :)

[Guest yoos]

:shock: WOW!! This sounds very very cool!

Edited January 24, 2005 by yoos

[Guest scott2eyes]

This sounds awesome!

=D>

[Guest Skunkchild]

This sounds the business - pm sent

[Guest nedge2k]

Our early efforts look wicked :D

[Guest mavisdavis]

cool