Q&A with Sweeter Home Developer, Kioma Valenzuela Aldecoa!

Well, when it rains it pours. First you get Rosetta finally released, and now I’m happy to present a great Q&A with the lead developer of Sweeter Home, Kioma Valenzuela Aldecoa. Kioma gives us some amazing insight into what we can expect from Preview 2 and what the future holds for Sweeter Home. Read on…

Can you introduce yourself? What was your background before developing Sweeter Home?

I live in the San Francisco bay area in California. Sweeter Home is something I’ve been working on part time with a few others since around December. Over the last few years I’ve been involved in several technology-oriented startups in managerial and technical capacities. Prior to releasing Sweeter Home, I helped build and launch Catalista, which is an android app geared toward volunteering. Previous companies where I had important roles included NPC, which was also donation/volunteer oriented; and GeoSpot, which had very ambitious LBS-related aspirations.

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How was the response to Preview 1?

The response was amazing, especially given that it was intended to be a true preview release with limtied functionality and big limitations. Because of the nature of the release, and the generally primitive nature of Android, I invested heavily in including built-in functionality for handling bugs and suggesting improvements. I had no idea if people would actually use these features, but they sure did, and in large numbers. This enabled quick bug fixes, and also allowed us to guide new featured development based on actual requests from users.

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Were you surprised with what people did with the tools you gave them?

When I started creating Sweeter Home, there were no other home screens on the market and I really wasn’t sure what to expect. I was glad that people put in the time to figure out the UI and do some amazing things. It’s been particularly impressive seeing the layouts created by users like Lemon (ha, thanks! -Lem) and the accompanying youtube videos.

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A lot of people had memory issues depending on their layouts. How tough is memory management in such a small device?

It’s tough to get both good performance and stable memory consumption, and on a young platform like Android, especially while allowing unlimited numbers of custom images in a UI. All of the memory problems I’ve seen are related to images. In Preview 1 we tried a few adjustments that sacrificed performance but reduced the chance of running out of memory, but the price in performance was too high. Preview 2 will try a completely new approach to image management that will differentiate between design mode and usage mode. While actually using a layout, memory should be very stable and support large numbers of source images, and performance should be consistent.

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How are thing’s going on Preview 2? Any release date in mind?

Preview 2 is only about 50% done, which isn’t where I wanted it to be by this point. There should be a private beta within weeks.

The bigest reason for the delay is that, two months ago, I temporarily switched focus to another Android app, Catalista. A huge opportunity came up and it was a little crazy for several weeks. Catalista underwent a major overhaul and we received some promotional assistance from Google and some other big players. Another local android developer — Red Droid Software — did much of the development work for the overhaul. Between keeping them going, and keeping the Catalista people and partners happy, not much got done with Sweeter Home during that period. I am proud of what the Catalista team pulled off in short time, and I’m glad the Android world has a cutting edge volunteering app. But at this point I’m minimally involved in that and a few weeks ago switched focus back to Sweeter Home.

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What are the main changes we can expect to see when Preview 2 drops?

These are the major planned features:

• Sharing: It will be way easier for people to share layouts with each other. This is the area I am most excited about and some very groundbreaking things should be possible when this is all hooked up.
• Stability improvements: Stability problems were rooted in how images were handled, and how the list of applications got created. A new but more sophisticated approach should fix these issues and make it more usable at the same time.
• UI: The UI of the designer is overhauled. The mechanics of actually manipulating settings on a touch screen should be way improved, and it should be much more obvious what the effect is of a change
• Widgets: There is already basic widget support in the internal Preview 2 build. Unfortunately, the Cupcake widget model does not mesh well with the Sweeter Home model, and some of the documented functionality does not yet work in Cupcake. We’ll either have to live with the limitations, or there will need to be a custom approach. I’m not sure yet which it will be for Preview 2.
• More durable layout format: This is a major change internally. The new format is XML-based and should allow much better flexibility when new features are exposed, and allows inlining images and other resources. This new format is not backwards compatible with Preview 1. People with layouts from Preview 1 will be able to convert them to the new format from a yet-to-be-released Preview 1 version.
• No copy protection: I made the mistake of turning on copy protection in Preview 1, which prevents many people from downloading and running the app. Unfortunately, due to market limitations, turning off copy protection would cause people to lose their Sweeter Home customizations when they installed. Since Preview 2 will already require a manual export/import of custom data, this is the perfect time to also turn off copy protection.

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So more stability in Preview 2?

The already noted image and application handling overhaul should help with stability. I should emphasize, though, that aside from memory-related image problems, the problem is often that very poor performance in some situations causes the “application not responding” message to come up. There will be a more sophisticated approach that attempts to get much better perceived performance and prevent those messages.

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Have there been any challenges with Android 1.5 (cupcake)?

There have been some real conceptual problems integrating Widgets with Sweeter Home, as I mentioned before. Otherwise, Cupcake has been great. We received reports of improved performance and no cupcake-specific bugs.

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Widgets in Preview 2! What excites you about widgets?

Basic Widget support is in the internal Preview 2 build now. I have no doubt that widgets are going to become the killer feature of Android. As a user, being able to have the apps I care about most featured on the home screen is fun and convenient. There is going to be a challenge in meshing the cupcake widget concept with Sweeter Home, but the result will be very powerful.

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You respond really quickly to feedback, both bugs and features. Is it tough to filter out the ‘noise’ and stay focused on workable suggestions? And how many people are working on your project?

At first we responded very quickly to bug reports and feedback, but that’s become much more difficult with recent increased usage.

Aside from me, there are only a few others working on Sweeter Home in an official capacity. I am in the proccess of adding to the team so that our response to feedback and bugs is more consistent.

Also, one of our users, shaneaus, has really stepped up and helped keep the bugs and feature requests organized on the web site. His help in keeping things straight has been indispensible. It is also very inspiring to know that our users care enough about this app that they’re willing to put in some time of their own to make it a success.

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Looking past Preview 2 what does the future hold for Sweeter Home?

After things settle down with regards to stability and UI, the future is going to be all about sharing, collaboration, and integration. I don’t want to reveal much more than that just yet, but the home screen of a 3G smart phone running an OS as open as Android deserves some real innovation in this area.

Thanks for you time, Kioma!

Android and Me Homescreen Contest

Check out all the entries in the first Android and Me Homescreen contest. Really great to see a few Sweeter Home entries in there too. Great work, guys.

UPDATE: The winners of Week 1 are here. No Sweeter Home winners, but the prizes are selected at random so get your home screen in there, people!!!

Delays! Ergh!

Sorry about the delays in the last week everyone. Have had some major issues at work which have taken massive amounts of my free time. Rosie style theme this week, plus I’m going to try and tidy up all my PSD files for released themes for your guys to hack around with. Also might drop another couple of templates for making themes, and wallpapers!

I’ll be back.

Some news!

In the last one or two weeks I’ve been getting a lot of questions about Sweeter Home progress and “when is it being updated?”. I got in touch with the developer yesterday to find out. He got a little waylaid at Google I/O with another project and has just got back into the swing of Sweeter Home again. He said to expect Preview 2 in “weeks” not days.

Sweeter Home Preview 2 will introduce a new theme format that isn’t backwards compatible with the Preview 1 format. The old format was a binary format that wasn’t durable or flexible. The new format is XML-based and should be very flexible

This means Preview 1 will receive an update to a “bridge” version, allowing you to save your Preview 1 themes into the upgraded Preview 2 format! Cool, we don’t lose our themes.

There’s some other cool stuff too which will surface soon. In the meantime myself and others are testing a closed beta of the bridging P1 version which is basically exactly the same as P1 but with the extra export option in the menu.

So YES, updates are coming!!!

Rosie work in progress

Still underway. Clock is just an image, hence the ‘fine print’. Working on making the UI clearer for springboard use. Should be ready in a few days.

Jazzed

I throw these themes up online, and get plenty of page views and feedback and questions, and it’s great to see that kind of response. But there’s actually nothing better than seeing someone rocking your theme with their own background and apps and loving it. I only ever see my them on my own phone, so the fact that other people are running them is still kind removed from me. notxel21, you just made my day!

I started this blog in a rush since my original Matricks video got so much burn on a bunch of Android news sites and I really needed somewhere to funnel the attention and questions. I also wanted somewhere to share the stuff I learn about building themes in Sweeter Home since it seemed most people hadn’t got a grasp on it at that early stage, and a lot of new user struggle with the learning curve.

Since my first post here I’ve have over 50,000 views (crossed over today) from over 4,500 vistors. All you guys spend an average of almost 5 minutes here per visit which is huge! Thank you so much for visiting and for your support. And most of all, thanks to the developer of Sweeter Home for his hard work so far!We all can’t wait for Preview 2!

Ask Lemon!

If there’s anything you wanted to know about Sweeter Home – how to get a certain effect you’re looking to achieve, how to name trays, how to add spring boards – anything – ask away! Once a week I’ll post some questions and answers to help you learn to use Sweeter Home better and faster.

Just post your questions in comments below, or hit me up on Twitter @sweeterskins.

Reminder: I’m not a Sweeter Home developer, just an enthusiast!

Sweeter Home Preview 2 on the way!

You may have noticed a slowdown in the amount of updates being released by Sweeter Home. This is because the developer has been hard at work getting Preview 2 ready. I’m not sure of the improvments we can expect yet, but at a guess I’d say improved memory handling, a differentiation between static and dynamic layers for better performance, bug fixes, scrolling improvements and more. Whatever the case it’s coming soon!

Some exciting news in the (unending) lead up to Android 1.5 is talk surrounding widgets. Jeff Sharkley discusses widgets here, but the most interesting part for Sweeter Home is quoted below:

One last cool thing to mention is that the AppWidget framework is abstracted in both directions, meaning alternative home screens can also contain widgets. Your widgets can be inserted into any home screen that supports the AppWidget framework.

It hasn’t been confirmed that more widgets will be included in Sweeter Home any time soon, but the high volume of widget requests, discussion of widget support in cupcake and the Sweeter Home developer’s recent comment “cupcake is just around the corner and it will change the game,” leads me to think that the most exicting releases in Sweeter Home are just around the corner.

Question time: What standard apps do you use most?

At the moment I’m toying with a few simple home screen ideas using graphics.

My question for you guys is this: What are your most common “one touch” apps?

There are pros and cons when using graphics as the basis for a theme, but the main con is that the graphic is set in stone. If you’re using graphic text as placeholders for launching applications you’re stuck with them. This is OK if fonts are involved as you can make the PSD file available for others to edit as they like, but when you’re dealing with cool custom text design (like this) you need to cater for the most common functions most people use.

There are a few standards I personally like to use (a utilities tray/folder, gmail, maps, Market, IM, SMS, Steel), but I have no idea if these are things you guys use regularly.

So if you had to choose 8 quick launch shortcuts for your main home screen what would they be?

Back soon

Hi all, thanks for reading and commenting! I’m still on holiday but back to normal sometime tomorrow when I fly back home. Upcoming posts will include simply, how to share, download and install a theme; and also a simple tutorial on how to change tray names for those people who want to edit my themes to their liking.

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