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!