Gadgetory

welcome the end original android hangout show on google+ I'm dare cross and I'm Scott Anderson I'm Dan Charlton I'm Johnathan Franklin I'm Chris look i'm nate swanner and we are joined this week with special guest Tony McDonald from technician technician is the mastermind behind the chameleon launcher for android Tony thanks for joining us ain't no problem it's great to be here guys thanks for having me alright so if you aren't familiar with technician or chameleon launcher this is actually the third time we've had them on our show we're very happy to have them continuing to support the show come back and join us the first time we had them on there was uh was late last summer when chameleon launcher for tablets first pushed out to kickstarter backers and since then we've had them on talking about a major update to the platform and now we're back again I believe to talk about another major update to the platform um before we get started with Tony here I guess if you're not familiar with chameleon um they're in in Tony you can correct me from wrong here the the design philosophy behind chameleon was home screens on Android are kind of you know poorly executed home screens should have the information you want at your fingertips you know you shouldn't have to go searching for it and and it should be based on context you know where you're at and so forth so so you guys set out to make the android home screen experience much better correct yeah I know that's sort of the simple way to say it but you know I the idea behind chameleon was to be you know sort of a Content centric launcher which is very different from you know the way everybody else approaches a launcher we wanted to do something you know with chameleon that was different than just oh here's an icon and launched an app or you know here's a widget with next to no relevant in showing in it that just looks good on your home screen instead we wanted to make your you know launcher experience be something that as soon as you turn on your tablet you'd be seen enough information that was relevant to you right when you turn it on so that was primarily the goal and and you know it informed a lot of the chameleon philosophy which you know in a way was aliens some people at the beginning because you know the sake watchers normally are focused on content they're just pointers to other applications right I said yeah that's the difference primarily and how we try to distinguish ourselves and continue to you know as chameleon evolves we want to continue to explore that idea more and more okay so as I we said you know initially when chameleon launcher first came about to Android it was initially just for tablets that's right and as of this afternoon Kickstarter backers we're happy to find out that something exciting came along the way chameleon to ya million to added support for phones you tell us a little bit about that yeah so well the idea we always wanted to adapt chameleon to you know as much of the like as big of an Android scope as we could get but it was true that the history of chameleon would like it was built off the back of another project that you know we a technician were working on with texas instruments which was tablet centric at the time like that was the form factor we were shooting at and we kind of built off that because what we found was that if you look at a lot of people maybe it's changed these days but at the time a lot of android tablets people would have all the screen real estate on their launcher and not really much to do with it you know like yeah you can populate through a whole bunch of apps around but i always find that you know people might have a launcher screen that's filled with apps but how often do they actually engage with all that screen real estate they tend not to like the vast majority of people probably only use a handful of apps rather than this whole scope of apps that they would have on their tablet so you know idea was trying to figure out how do we make something engaging like by adding more content that's relevant in the tablet format and then you know eventually we'll go to the phone because there's a very big difference and we know especially where we're at now supporting the tablet and the phone we've realized the dramatic difference between those two form factors when you're in a contract content centric environment it really you know informed it forces to change you know how the widgets work to an extent and how other things in chameleon-like contexts and stuff work as well so you know we did start from the tablet but we wanted to expand it out and you know in there there was many little places that we hit that you know there was almost a conflict between the two forum factors that made it challenging for us so what was it hard to add tablet support were there any major design changes or horse philosophies need to be changed along the way you mean phone support I'm sorry phone support yeah yes there was actually quite a lot so um like very simply at the beginning it just introduced way way more devices that we had to develop for and the thing to remember that's like kind of important about chameleon you know it it talks to the architecture underneath is that our chameleon widgets are HTML based right so um that being the case we had to do a lot of HTML and CSS development to get the widgets to behave in all kinds of different sizes and different you know screen resolutions different screen densities which can be a little bit more challenging in some senses in CSS than it is like natively in android so right there just widgets alone we had to approach them and change a few things about how they work the other thing is you know our the way we present our grids and chameleon isn't like fixed it's not the same as the normal android launchers you know we kind of its it's more design from a relative size type perspective and because of that the widgets really had to have a proper responsive design kind of implementation because you know each box in the grid can actually vary in size depending on what device it is and what screen density is and all these various things so you know some of the guys who work with us particularly Ian Shaw who does a lot of our HTML development and CSS work like man that guy work day and night many times to get all of the possible configurations that a lot of the widgets could be in to look decent right so did you guys have any hurdles going from tablet size to down to sign a smaller form factor then yeah well we had to change some things about the widgets like for example the header bars of all our widgets are totally redesigned now and they're designed to be like there's two kind of focuses their one they're meant to be bolder and square because on the phone it just felt like you didn't have as much empty free space to deal with you it was much more condensed so our kind of new square bold headers box things in a little nicer it looks better on the phone just from an aesthetic perspective but also we introduce this new like sort of action menu it's like you know your traditional Android options button that's at the top right and the reason for that is you know originally we had the idea that you'd have a few actionable icons on the top right of the widget but on the phone immediately that goes away and you know you're not getting the type of space alongside of the title of the widget that you need on a phone and in that amount of space so this new drop out menu is you know the new approach that we've added and that was kind of interesting too because it'll allow us with widgets to add a lot more options for actionable items to each individual widget so that was another major development that you know we change and then throughout the application it was you know kind of your more run-of-the-mill you know dealing with the screen densities in the smaller sizes and just adapting all the chameleon graphics to really scale down and it chameleon now will actually run on very very small devices like those I forget the exact model but there we have one in our office one of those really tiny phones and chameleon runs fine on it it can be a little bit tight you know but at the same time at least it's it's not off limits we can basically go from any size small size enough now so okay yeah I i noticed that i believe correctly from wrong that the phone launcher supports 720p devices and higher you don't support any lower than that resolution is that right yeah well the reason for that is mainly an aesthetic thing amongst our design team yeah you know they are just nitpicky about that we could actually go smaller but then you're starting to enter in the range where things just become a little bit unwieldly so you know the lower limit you know is you know pretty much as low as we can get it all make sense usable leader that probably isn't um most of the ice cream sandwich and above phones and i can think of or 720p anyways happen on the ankle the vast majority of them are just as a reminder to our live listening and watching audience on YouTube and Google+ if you have any questions about chameleon for Tony go ahead and drop them in the comments I'll we've a few more talking points to lined up here and then we'll go and get to your question so if you have any go ahead and put them in the comments and we'll mark them down and we'll talk about them here a little bit so what'd you talk about saw a few of the new new features and some of the challenges and so forth uh he kind of go over some of the new features that you're announcing with with chameleon too yeah so there's a couple things that are brand new um you know one thing that I do want to mention is you know we really you know even though sometimes people don't believe it we really really listen to what everyone's saying and you know I mean this has been a whole adventure for us this chameleon thing but we really really have listened to our the heavy criticisms that people have given us and that and this new version we started by actually focusing on critical matters that people were complaining about so the first thing and I'm glad to see it today actually I we've really been paying attention to what people are and I'm really glad to hear that where we put most of our focus is what people are noticing so for example Phil and I in particular you guys know Phil yep it spent a lot of time and really pushed out deliverables like within you know technician for chameleon to make sure we got a couple of things right and performance and you know especially on older devices and stuff like that is what we really focused on so there was a time where Phil and I sat down and we basically gutted a whole bunch of the code that we wrote to render various parts of chameleon and the HTML widgets and we rewrote them from scratch and that's sort of why yellow like a lot of people say well why are you guys taking so long this and that well Phil and I wanted to make sure that we got a couple of things right at the core going forward because you know we notice the criticisms were there primarily and so we did that and luckily like the good news today as people are saying yeah it's performing great on my old tablet the transitions are smooth it feels great so like we put a lot of effort into that like over fifty percent of the time spent was just making it faster making it perform on old devices and get where we want so that's a big thing and I know that's not necessarily the bells and whistles things people get excited about but it was something we wanted to get right and I think we did in this version but I don't think you did get it right yeah yeah and what Mikey the one thing I've realized about android development cuz I've been doing it now for a couple years but I mean to do it right you have to have an army of devices in your shop for us now like I mean everyone's desk is covered in five or 10 devices if you ever see Ian Shaw that works for us he's always posting pics on Instagram you know when he's designing widgets and stuff he's got like 10 devices on his desk and you know they're all running the same thing it's updated hilarious but it really is like that with the Android development is crazy but so that was a focus but new features and chameleon stuff that is great is one of the biggest things was when we finished chameleon the first version you know aside from performance stuff that we knew we had to fix another thing that we didn't think we got right was something that we were actually trying to focus on which was this whole concept of context oriented no data and dashboards right yeah now we like the idea we thought we were in the right ballpark but I remember goober evita he's our president and stuff he sat down with this one day and said you know there's something wrong with context and he he explained his vision of what he wanted it to become and I agreed with him and Phil and I I know we were are there was technical reasons why we wanted to go in the same direction but it was this idea of okay with chameleon we want to get to this but you know we'll put that feature out a little bit but as we started re working on this new version of chameleon eventually we said okay let's just do it now too while we're doing this big overhaul of various other things and we got in so one thing people notice is the whole idea of context are in to dashboards is very different in the new chameleon instead of it being originally it was like I've got five pages and each of those pages I can attach rules to and then chameleon I'll switch between those pages we discarded that and now it's sort of like your dashboard scenario opens up and you've got three pages beside and that's one context so you apply your your rules of time and space or whatever do that and then you can create right now I think the maximum limit we have of context is 15 but that's this arbitrary for now we could actually make it bigger and hopefully want to go to the world where you can have unlimited amount of context so each dashboard context you create gets three pages it gets its own app tray and all of the stuff and you can create context for anything like it's not only just spatial stuff too it's not even just like oh I'm traveling or oh it's 9pm activate this you can create content oriented ones as well so like I create dashboards for young you know I'm a hockey fan because I'm a Canadian I guess that's a good comparison but you know like on a game night where my team the ottawa senators are playing I've or that's just related to Twitter feeds and news feeds of what's going on on game night now and that dashboard will automatically activate itself you know you know if I wanted to but normally I'll just switch it on and look at all the pre-prepared feeds or whatever love you had for let's say let's say nine p.m. with the time the game time was yo on time would automatically be contextually it would switch over to your game feed to have your you Twitter feeds your RSS feed set up for the you know hockey news or whatever yeah but we've tried to set it up so that the context the contextual rules aren't the only thing about context now now you can create topical dashboards as well that don't necessarily have rules they're just something you can switch to and there was technical reasons for that change as well which was that we were doing it in the original chameleon you know eventually we would just not have the capacity in memory to load all this stuff in real time the way it worked so now each context when you switch contacts it reloads the dashboards up individually so it allows us to add way more context but not hold them all in memory at the same time so it was both a technical challenge and aux challenge and I think in the new chameleon it sets the standard for where we're going with it in the future and we've got some great ideas of how to expand it in the future as well so that's one big one that people notice as a difference other things this is just stuff that people wanted to see so we've added folders as you'd expect and that's big i noticed that as well item i thought that was big because you know we're so used to organizing things and folders and I was actually missing that now in you know previous versions of chameleon I noticed that yesterday when I loaded it up and I have hey what's this little link icon here you know and I started playing around with it and you know all you talk about it but i'll explain that is the new concept that we put in there but um to talk about folders first people wanted it it's pretty standard issue in chameleon the only the first chameleon the only reason we didn't do it was just we wanted to get something out to the public and we were focused more at that time on the widget experience in the content experience but commute like folders sorry we're always on like our product backlog we knew we were doing it so now it's there people have it just like they'd expect um but what we also added was linked folders like you said which is something a little bit different that you know I you know I've gotten some great feedback from it but at first people are puzzled by it a little bit we're gonna upload some videos next week probably that'll explain some of these features that people can see but linked folders the concept line is if you create a folder in chameleon and you open it it's got as you said this little link icon that you can click and when you do that it basically creates like a saved version of that folder that sits sort of where your apps are there's another tab there I don't know I well people see it when they download it but the whole idea is then you can create multiple instances of that folder so that original like yo template of it you can create and put that same folder wherever you want now every time you create an instance of that folder all those folders as long as they have the little link on icon they're all linked so if you change one like if you change its title or its contents every instance of it where you put it also updates right so they remain insync all the time but that's the reason it's there that makes it special is chameleon the ideas we're trying to promote contextual dashboards so you're using this yo context or this context or this one and it gets annoying if you say if you were the type person that would have ten contexts you don't necessarily want to add your phone and your messages and your blah blah blah like all these group taps your games or whatever it may be to your dashboard every time so if you create a linked folder you can instantiate it across contexts and it'll remain in sync across all of those so it's think of those linked folders is like a reusable group once you create that group you can put that group anywhere and anytime you change it everywhere else will remain insync all the time he's going to group what's up delete the group if you delete the group then right now and chameleon what will happen is it'll when you go to delete it'll say whether if there's instances of it across it'll say if there's instances it'll remove them basically um we're gonna play with that feature a little bit and I'm open to feedback on that feature like if people say hey it'd be cool if it worked this way or that way actually from our alpha testers who are awesome by the way thumbs up to them I had kind of our secret group of people um they've given a me some Indian Phil and the team working on that some great feedback of things that I'm already thinking of changing a little bit about linked folders but it's a feature that works pretty well in chameleons very useful especially if you use context but you know it's kind of new and you know I'm open to feedback from what people say when they see it I like the linked folders I'm one of the guys that likes to have a folder with all my google apps you know on my home screen I you know I like that so no matter what my home screen looks like I want to have all my google apps right there just in case so the fact that i can now do that that's very nice well to give you guys an idea if you want to know where we're going with it i have some development stuff already it's not in this version of chameleon but just to give people an idea of where it's going is this like linked folders are like user controlled right so you create a group and you say that's my group and i want to use that all over the place and keep it in sync but other that little folders tab I got a tweet today people are saying well that's a lot of screen real estate just for a couple of folders that I created well what I intend to add to it in the future is intent like I don't know how many people are developer oriented here but probably a lot but they're going to be intent oriented folder so it would be things like you can say well it'll probably be done automatically but chameleon will automatically create a few folders and search for certain intent categories like things like things that are labeled as games are things that are labeled this productivity and art automatically create those as folders that's very cool automatically find all your social apps or some you know and that's right or yeah that's very cool yeah so stuff like that is where we're going to go with it and we've got even some more advanced ideas around folders and you know maybe want to do there have a you know automatically create your social screen or something like that yeah very very neat yeah so that's one and another one if you want another feature sorry I don't know how much I'm unhappy yeah yeah talk talk about another feature I could talk all night but another future this one is huges and people were yelling at us all the time about this one so we finally we finally did it but it's a middle ground I would say is that people like one of the things people like why can't I put an icon on my dashboard like people were outraged in some ways about that like kind of in a good way but what people didn't realize is and you know maybe it's you know partially our fault is you know chameleon we wanted it to be a content oriented experience so like I keep saying that but that was our philosophy so the idea was we wanted to use as much dashboards faces we could for content that was important to you and we used ourselves as templates so we're Twitter users and Instagram users and Facebook users so our widgets we wanted to put them front and center right so to us like apps on the dashboard was a minor factor like does we wanted to have our tweets and all that taking up all the space and you know we did realize we were like okay you know this is where you know the status quo is kind of dragging us into doing it this way and you know people have a good case like okay I want to put more impor so we were trying to solve the problem and it was kind of like a head scratcher because we were like well do we introduce a new grid that's designed for icons like all the other launchers or do we is there a way to meet in the middle so what we did is we introduce this new thing in the new chameleon that we call app launcher widgets which is basically half way between from what we want and what people were asking us for on that tip so basically the idea is now if you grab to pick up an app from chameleon from the app you know the main app grid or whatever it'll pop down and will say would you like to put this to the dashboard you drag it up there it snaps back down to your dashboard and as you drag over the dashboard you see the grid high light with this blue kind of highlight in the circle in the middle as you move it in it'll prompt you it'll turn to a plus sign and if you drop it it creates a widget like every other chameleon widget but that chameleon widget is an app grid so you can clip it essentially creates the same effect of putting apps on your dashboard like you'd be used to in other launchers except it's in the container of a widget which kind of creates this interesting situation because you USC you can create folders and drop whatever you want on there but you can edit that widget change its size it pages so you could add like every app you want into one of these widgets and you could have it being like a one by one and you could scroll through every single app if you wanted and an app launch or widget um so it was kind of us meeting in the middle we thought it was kind of cool too because if you lay out apps on your dashboard you can move them around and resize them in it it kind of is a different approach as to everyone else and you know it met in the middle from sort of like the architecture of chameleon without us having to fundamentally change our approach to widgets in that so again that's another thing that we think is kind of cool we'll see what people say I'm looking for feedback on it you know like V our twitter account or you know the chameleon forums and all that tell us what you think but you know it works out pretty well that's what at least our opinion yeah I put some on some tap widgets I guess is we'll call them on my screen my home screen yeah I did I like that feature said I'm one of the guys that i have a few screen setup using the standard widgets you know the chameleon widgets and then I have another screen with you know some Android widgets and then some some apps as well so actually speaking of of widgets one of the I know a lot of people wanted to know are more chameleon based widgets coming i remember back when we first spoke with you guys many months ago philip had said that at some point that you were envisioning almost for lack of better words on call like an app store a place to go to to get widgets that other people had developed the third party you know developers had had added and submitted that this you know this store is that something that you're still thinking of adding in the future or is that changed yeah it's changed a little bit but you know it's surprising because it's something that we actually worked a lot on and it works really well in chameleon right now but you know not a lot of people know about it because we haven't made a big stink about it yet but we're going to in this version so the thing about it is right now we haven't introduced a store because you know as say like chameleons we're still small like the team doing it and we're not I guess at this very point in time prepared to invest in doing that yet like making a big story you have to get the interest there first right so what we've done though and you know I've posted a bit on our twitter account about this today and you know a few of us on the team intend to do a blog post in detail about this over the next couple days maybe into next week is that chameleon has a system built into it where if you create an HTML widget which by the way we have a whole SDK that we've created where people can create HTML widgets for chameleon which is out there and people are using that already so you can do that but chameleon cannot install widgets like directly right so we actually have this chameleon protocol that you can use it's like an install protocol that if you make a web page and you hit it using anything like your browser in chameleon you can create a link that will actually prompt the user to install a chameleon widget it's very high rated one and we have a whole bunch of people that work with us on our beta site in our alpha group or whatever that have done a lot of that um you know like one guy I know in particular Matthew told he's done a whole set of widgets he's still working on there's a few others as well that have experimented with it and you can install these widgets it's very very easy to do so what we at this stage what we intend to do is just take the lid off that and say to people well if you want to make widgets it's actually really easy and the chameleon AP is for doing it in JavaScript like expose all this great simple stuff for things like tapping into our settings windows and all that and tapping into a loss for example like it simplifies that process we've got all that streamlined and you know it's really quite easy to make cool widgets so we want to try and promote you know see if there's anyone out there that wants to develop some good HTML widgets and we're gonna try and bolster a little bit of a community exchange already out there you know a few guys that kind of got into it already and started experimenting set up a little site it's like chameleons widgets com it's still very early on you know they they just basically set up the infrastructure to exchange and install widgets the people make and we're going to build off that so we're going to keep it open for now and you know if it turns into something that people are interested in and want to contribute to you well then you know that will drive us to you know potentially build the store or that but I think it's still for us right now a little bit early for that um I like that approach only because recently I don't know how familiar you are with dashclock widget if you've heard about and it's the latest craze in my opinion with with with Android everybody's making extensions to to hook into this new widget and so many apps are adding support people were adding the third-party extensions and it's it's just the latest craze right now and I think that that would be awesome if something along those lines you continue with chameleon where people were just randomly making and additional widgets and contributing to it from a community standpoint it is letting the community grill and I think that I like that approach well it's in our court right at this point because we have the functionality like I mean our widget SDK in like our approach to it this is part of the reason why we chose to go that way in a way is because you know not everybody that wants to make content is a Java programmer or an Android programmer and like is willing to download like the Android SDK and do all the stuff we've really been experimenting with you know web developer types that you know are you know use a lot simpler of a tool set and you know the widgets are a lot simpler in their nature so that's sort of like where the chameleon philosophy for widgets is but that being said you know we have the infrastructure in our widget system like we drink our own kool-aid all of our widgets are made on the exact same platform that we put out to everybody else in JavaScript and the feature set that we have for them like I mean we've implemented like a web caching system that is super robust like it's not just like your traditional html5 web cache like this thing you know pulls down files in real time across multiple domains and makes them available like you know you've got all data saving mechanisms you've got you know you can tap into androids full intent system and do all kinds of neat stuff there and you can even create native Android services if you are an Android developer and have your HTML widget leverage that like our calendar widget does that's built on the same system that we put out there so that kind of thing is what we're going to try and focus on in the next little while we do have one other widget that is almost finished and people are on our back about this all the time because we did talk about it so we do have a media player widget as well um it's not designed in in HTML it's actually like chameleon has about three or four different types of widgets actually like under the hood so we've got our html5 widgets we support Android application or app widgets and then we have two other types internally to chameleon so one example of that is like our make a widget widget is like an Android or a chameleon native widget and the music player widget will be like that too so it'll be something that is sort of native in the code in chameleon but it's almost finished like I mean we have it pretty much ready we just back-burnered it a bit for this release because there is other priorities that we thought were higher on the scale but it won't be very long like I mean we've pretty much had a finish and people keep bugging us for it we're like yeah we're gonna get there it's just there's other things that we need to get straight first so all right we'll be more we have a handful of user questions let's take a break from some questions dan you want to hit up some of the user questions people been submitting yeah so Dexter Johnson asked about the performance so how is it compared to the stock Android launcher in terms of resource usage honey your gel ones that's great the good news on that is the newest chameleon what you'll notice right away is you know it's just responsiveness is so much faster than the previous chameleon was which is good we really focus on that so the rendering and stuff like that but you know like I'll air the baggage right away like I'm one of the lead engineers on at me and Phil and I can talk to this because it's potentially one of our biggest biggest challenges and something that doesn't always come out in the normal blog so think about this is that chameleon uses and leverages web views in android for those that are technical to render the widgets which gives us as say a lot of advantages we can install them and uninstall them in real time and simplify like workflow in a lot of ways but our biggest challenge completely has been dealing with the implementation of web view on Android and its various versions like I would almost go to the point to say that it's been a nightmare that and I can list three bugs in particular that are Android like system level bugs that have almost been showstoppers for us that we've barely been able to circumvent so two of them are very well known amongst the development community just issues that have not been addressed actually one was addressed in jelly bean and now it's fixed but see this is the type of issue that we have is like in jelly bean and up everything's okay but in for example android 4.0 point 3 there was a brutal bug in webview that just literally would crash chameleon and nothing to do with any of our codes fault it was something we couldn't change and it's that'd to get around that were you aiming were you able to get around out what up devices are stuck on four point oh three so uh well we've sort of contained it there is an issue with it all mit that straight up we're actually going to do a post about that directly there isn't really a way around it because the problem you know for the technical heads out there you know is basically that once a web view or if you use web views in an Android application in four point zero point three what will happen is that the webview system or like the web core puts a limit of 512 local file references on you right so that means basically if I load files locally from the system which we have to do through our web cache to make our widgets work if 512 references are made then everything just crashes there's no way around it at all it's inside you know that that Android ROM are inside you know the basic android of that version so it's been logged many times and people have been totally frustrated about it it was such a bad bug that they fixed it shortly thereafter so you know now we're okay in the newer versions but in that particular series like there's nothing we can do about it so it's that type of frustration we've had others as well like any Android developer out there that may have worked with webview in the environment where we are where we're creating an app on the App Store has probably encountered some of the others like some of them like to do with web view memory leaks for example which are well-known from which context you pass to it blah blah blah like this is developer stuff another issue is that our Android widgets use web view and use a transparent background which means that on certain old Samsung devices like I was saying before their implementation of webview creates this weird problem that we refer to as double draw where it all of a sudden these these Samsung implementations of webview catches this one first like view of the widget and won't release it and that one we eventually figured out a fix for but it was literally like okay like we have to force rerender and resize the widget x 1 pixel in the background in order to get the background implementation to redraw the widget properly so the problem is that part of chameleons around the web widgets has been a bit of a nightmare because the basic implementation of WebKit and how it's exposed through the Android SDK is filled with problematic bugs like ones that we've had to work night and day to try and figure out how to get around if we could at all so it's been a challenge that I would say you know it's like out of all the problems that we face when you know working with Android and working on chameleon sixty to seventy percent of all the problems we face come from web view and the implementation of it on various devices and how it's different on various devices and platforms is a challenge that's something that's a lot of fun so yeah we've almost got to the point where we just to put it this way where we've had to almost been forced to buy android totally abandon the html5 thing altogether because it's that problematic like across the fragmented atmosphere in android so one of the other listeners asks where can they get this launcher right you've been here talking about it where can they go and find it is it on the Play Store or just cost money what if it's due to get it um well right now so uh none Google Play we have it up there and if people go and look they're going to see the plethora of things and actually in the future they're going to see a plethora more of things so what we have is chameleon is a really original II started as a Kickstarter project that if you go there you're going to see Oh chameleon launcher pre-orders free right well the thing is if you download that chameleon you won't be able to use it because it's only for people that have registered and paid later sorry not just paid by contributed to our Kickstarter campaign so that's clothes now you can't use that unless you're a Kickstarter we do have chameleon for sale that's the normal pay version or whatever it's 399 but I would tell people just hold up we haven't released new chameleon to that yet because our promise to Kickstarter's is we'd give them the first stab at this new version which were very proud of and they get the first stop of the phone and also they are working with us to clear out some of the final issues so you know we're still collecting feedback right now that our Kickstarter edition that's out there you know we have a tool in there that where we're logging feedback and logging bugs and stuff like that so we've still got a bit more time to just get it perfect so when that's finished it'll go to Google Play to the pay version and people be able to download it for three I think it's I'm sorry I gotta check it's 399 399 yeah you're right yeah but we're also going to create a new version on Google Play that'll just be specifically tailored for the phone only for those that are phone oriented people that just want that and not the tablet experience and it'll be a dollar cheaper so it'll be at times okay and then the 399 version includes both phone and tablet them that's correct yeah so so that's what you can expect to come to see there well that's very nice very good I didn't know that ok so we have another user asking if the launcher still works with live wallpapers so no it does not and you know this is something that's kind of interesting is wallpapers are something we opted out of of chameleon it's actually been a debate in our office we can return to using our like showing natural android wallpapers the reason that we don't is twofold one is that uh our design team in particular who are really nitpicky wanted the design to work a certain way where you know like I say the the wallpaper is part of the dashboards that slide up and down and reveal and you just can't capture that from the native android wallpaper system it must remain there especially live wallpapers which there's no access to it all as an Android developer so we kind of put a layer over top of that however we've always kind of in our back pocket had well we can return to that system if we want to and maybe we will in the future if people really want just to tap into the normal android wallpaper system so right now we we kind of dodge it but we can come back to it and our design team likes to make cool wallpapers we have kind of our own wallpaper system you know we like it we think it's cool and you know as say our design team would probably yell bark at most people's wallpaper configurations anyway go who wants to look at that yeah no not Tony can't you you can share any image on your phone with million launcher right yeah yeah but that's a custom implementation of wallpapers that we made specifically for chameleon that we sort of control but you know talking about live wallpapers people say can I use live wallpapers no but that's just because we block it with our own wallpaper so you can use your own regular wallpaper you want to use oh yeah you could but you know we're always open like if there is enough feedback where people say you know what I'd really like to use my whatever crazy well live wallpaper with chameleon well you know that would push us over the edge to enable that right all right that's another listener question is would you ever consider adding root or adding a reversion to increase the functionality or potentially so the widgets that you'd be able to discipline it well you know the thing is is that where we listen to everything people say and you know we have our own featureless like we're passionate about features we we actually have a whole bunch of things we want to do and believe it or not they're very different than probably what most people are thinking because I say we've got this kind of weird vision of how we want to detour chameleon away from the status quo more even from launchers but we're driven by what people want so if people communicate with us and make a big enough stink about it we will do whatever needs to be done you know so like we're open to anything so anything's possible that's yeah okay I do any other user questions dan not that I've seen all right so let's go back to our our list here um I believe John one other thing I can drastically that I thought about because it goes back to the first question you guys asked me from users and it's something I would like to address because I've already talked about it a couple times on Twitter tonight just because it's a thing that again me and Phil effaced big time and I'd lie to share with everybody so everyone can sort of see what we're facing this is to do with performance and stability like people asked about that and one of the biggest questions we get from people that are technical enough and know what they're doing on Android they'll say why does chameleon use so much memory or so much RAM right that we get that a lot and it's true it does and I just wanted to address that there is a point because chameleon can often use double in some cases the amount that some other launchers use right so I wanted to address that here if you guys are open to it sure so chameleon first off we use web views to render a lot of the content that is our widgets right and web views are something that you know if you're developing an application the way we're distributing over Google Play it's a system oriented service it's not part of our applications so you'll we instantiate these web views and they allow us to render the HTML content that memory is actually held by Android and managed by Android not by us but if you look at the you know memory reports from various tools it automatically associates that memory with us which is fine but the main reason it why chameleon uses so much memory is because our widgets are like many applications so some people would say whoa chameleons using a hundred megs of ram that's outrageous and then I'm like yeah you're right it is if you look at it that way but think about this take a look at Twitter running on your device add it to the amount of memory instagrams using on your device and Facebook and then add a launcher to that as well and then calculate what you end up with right and if you look at that you'll see chameleon behaves exactly within the frame of memory that it should in the penis chameleons not just a launcher we're not just icons with folders and a nice transition on there like our widgets are full bore you know applications in a way that stand alone and you know we can't leverage Twitter's local data because they don't expose that right like they're they're not going to open that sandbox for so we have to go out and get that data ourselves so our Twitter widget is a mini Twitter application same with our Instagram same other Facebook so if you have a dashboard filled with those widgets that we have to take on that memory right and that's why it looks like you know chameleon wow it's running with a lot of memory but if chameleons doing its job right hopefully it is maybe it's not i don't know we'll see what people say but you'll probably get if you set up if you're a user of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram everything you need to know just by turning on your tablet and seeing chameleon not necessarily going and navigating through all these individual apps our goal was to go you know it's to be always relevant immediately valuable you open up chameleon BAM your Twitter feeds their your Facebook feed your Instagram feed you know what you need to know and you didn't go clicking through all these apps so we were ready to take on that memory and the do that heavy load of memory that comes on just to achieve that there's no way around that right so that's the explanation when people ask me why does chameleon use 100 or 120 megs of ram well because you want to see a lot of content that's what makes sense really running less a launcher and more a window manager then yeah it's it's a Content experience posing as a launcher if you will you know sort of like that yeah uh John I I believe you had a question for Tony yeah just um looking at especially in the last year or so you look at like HTC when they announced since five and some parts of life TouchWiz and even with Google with Google now and having context it's it seems like a lot of people are agreeing on the philosophy of having context and content become a bigger part of your home screen yep no no you originally said this was a project that came from working with texas instruments so glad you see working with OEMs in the future that would want to bring chameleon almost as a stock experience to a device you know off the shelf or well i mean so there's things I can say in things I can't say but you know yes is that haha yeah so that that's sort of our goal is yeah we know we've known people are interested in this idea and you know we're just exploring it raw like it does we realize it was a good idea we tried to execute on it there's certain things for example that Google can do that we can't do right they have information that we just cannot ever get access to so it's inevitable that they're going to make that same move but for us you know we just wanted to explore that space and see what one could do even with the information that was just available to us and as say we do one of the things with chameleon that took us some time to get here right like a lot of people have said well why did it take you two or three months from the last update till here well we wanted to reorganize a couple of things because we want to get ourselves on a road where we can innovate away from the status quo like our biggest problem is the status quo actually is that we end up in this arms race with other launchers that we don't want to be in you know people keep saying to us they're like hey well you know this launcher has this feature and you guys don't this one has this feature and we're like who cares you know we don't care about that what we want to start doing is being something very different and that's the future for chameleon is something that is a launcher but not like the traditional status quo launcher that you think and in the future we're going to continue to push it in that direction and context like you said is an air in an area where we really want to focus and as I said when we change the context system in the new chameleon to present it differently that what the idea was that is behind that was is we had to get the foundation for that right in order to innovate further so that's what we focus on in last one that's why we delayed our timelines because we realized we wouldn't get where we wanted to go without that change and without that holdup at that time that make sense mm-hmm makes a lot of sounds yeah but you know I can give you an idea the if you guys want to know like i'm talking like a here and say these grand ideas that are invisible but let me throw you a scenario it kind of kind of gives you an idea of what you where we could go is what about a situation for example for chameleon where some user like how many people are on this chat or on this system right now like watching this i don't know i can't tell cuz there's seven people in the Hangout right now okay oh say you got a group of people and you guys have a fan base you know for your site what happens if we allowed you guys really easily to create the android authority dashboard that other users could download and you guys have ended in the way where you guys could decide what content shows on a stash board and update it remotely at any time and the app tray or whatever for that dashboard you guys could not only decide what apps are in there but you could promote other apps you could say hey this is our app of the week and in that person launcher if they didn't have it it would appear like hey download this app of the week that's the type of area that's where we want to go with it and have some fun kind of up that alley that's way different than other launchers so that's sort of like a vision thing for you to see where we're going and what we mean by context our dashboards we want to turn them into this thing that is bigger and shareable and all these kind of i think that they'll be interesting for brands for pay you know four pages for entities to go out there and do whatever they need to do to download their dashboard or distribute their dashboard to their customers or clients and that's an interesting concept okay well uh if anybody else is watching this live right now and has a question for Tony go ahead and drop it in the comments if not we're gonna move on to a few minutes Android news the this segment ran a lot longer than anticipated but you know what we found out a lot of cool stuff about chameleon that we didn't know so exciting information two possible scenarios about the future and it's always exciting these guys have been a constantly adding stuff as to he said at the beginning of the show that they listen to feedback and they really have I can I've seen this launcher grow over time adding user requests and keep getting better and better and better it's definitely something to check out if you haven't done so yet okay I do not see any new questions so let's a chat about some Android news real quick for another five minutes here and then we'll wrap up the shell um so really really quick we we saw the Galaxy Nexus get an unofficial whoa I'm sorry miss all the Galaxy Nexus on verizon get updated through a leak to android for 10 sad since have which is great that somebody found the link on google servers and distributed it it's sad that it's had to be Leah it's sad it's for updates behind and verizon has an updated it yet so if you want this rom you have to be on this stock four point one point one rom and then there's a download it's like a tea bagger 90 mag and you flash it through a TV side load and it's what it's supposed to be the most current version of android in its full glory so if we remove is a four point two point two Wow what's the latest really it's the latest version android you know it it brings a lot to me president wait until the for that do that too well you know it something it has new radios in everything everybody said oh you know four point one point two was too buggy that's why Verizon didn't do it in then I said all 4.1 or 4.2 is buggy and you know people make excuses British judge for us buddy you know people miss Mashable widows are you technically and they still released the phone so Verizon was waiting for to release new radios to say that hey it's got something new that we put in it but wait for our ass to put it in there so there's new radios if you're rocking the Galaxy Nexus all in big red let us know how those new radios work out I slapped it on my wife's phone my old Galaxy Nexus and my dad as gox Nexus a couple other friends have got to network well uh they're all running the new radios so far they really can't tell any difference but hey if you notice something awesome let us know battery life maybe hey you mentioned big red I need a try big red gum all that the other notable a device news real quick Motorola the razor yeah we talked about that it was a jelly bean update big evil you know what's really cool about about the razor getting jellybean the razor in the razr maxx is motorola or / google rolla actually did some cool stuff they've removed all sorts of crap from blur the companies they removed moto active moto print verizon video on demand they're all dead they removed like the alarm and the timer and they replaced them with a stock google clock so they actually puts on google apps in there they removed like moto cast and my gallery and my music and they replace them with gallery and google play music like they they removed you know bullet bloat and put them in the fat yeah they put in good and that's awesome you know that Motorola's doing that so start spamming your your update button if you have the razor razor maxx you you should have jellybean 4.1 point2 available service framework first stop clear cache all the all the tricks try to get it oh yeah so uh dan you want to bring us up to date on some real quick patent wars yes the big news over the last week was a judge Cote somewhat reversing course and setting aside or vacating rather some 450 million dollars out of apples little over 1 billion dollar award so right almost half of that big victory just disappeared but not entirely she's actually ordering a new trial so there will be presumably some damages to come from that trial but almost certainly not 450 million dollars worth because any quasi saying jury would never have award it but it was a word in the first place but really the big piece of this is cheese now turning back on the oh no this was a totally valid jury decision and having to set aside almost half of it and is holding off on the retrial until after the appeal may more and more obvious that they feel is not going to uphold it here 40 planes all right so uh to keep the show in an hour here one more quick question on ask nate nate recently wrote an article for android authority basically saying that what if the most hyped phone of this year i assume it's going to be fails you know last year the galaxy s3 sold an insane amount of phones it was insanely hyped and completely accept successful and nate's take on it was what if the s4 flops today you won't tell us a little bit about that what what were you what were your thoughts on that uh my thoughts on that were you know kind of when you look back like it leaked a blackberry the z10 that was really hyped and nobody came out it was just kind of like you know okay iphone 5 same thing that was kind of a big whomp whomp moment for Apple so my thought was you know there's a lot of hype to it and everybody's excited but what if it's not what we think it is yeah I think what it probably is not going to have that octa-core CPU a lot of people are gonna be really pissed just like they were with the sgs3 about not having the Exiles five then again people still bought it in droves and people are still buying the iphone 5 in terms you go remember the only people that actually care about what's underneath the hood is the people that are probably watching this right now you know the people that actually buy the devices the general customer the average consumer that Boz exits the newest latest and greatest don't care about numbers they did they don't you're so right like people people don't buy the iphone 5 they buy the iphone yeah the vast majority of their customers just go hey it's the iphone on getting a new one and that's that it's not because it's the iphone 5 and i really think the same thing happened with samsung's next galaxy there oh it's the next Galaxy everything's gonna happen like that well look at how many people were disappointed with the gs3 on the tech you know us the techies when we looked at and initially said this doesn't look any better than the One X and then it becomes the best-selling front of the year founder selling 20 million of them you know 10 million pre-orders but Samsung the marketing campaign has a lot to blame for that and I mean they did a great job doing that and you know really going against apple and those commercials they did a phenomenal job and they made us techniques you know laughs and hard it's like the notes doing right now versus them again yeah I I don't know if they're marketing campaigns gonna say the same but playfellow another thing is the galaxy s3 when you had a couple of phones I just didn't do anything blatantly wrong it didn't do anything particularly the best hood yeah it just the camera wasn't you know had a good camera and had a good display and there wasn't anything that was blatantly awful about it so it just ended up being a good option I guess we'll find out about the s for next Thursday night when Chris woke wiki in duisburg era and josh is going as well okay so to android authority guys are our main man at camera work Josh regard on the show a couple times and the man the myth the legend Wookiee he shall be there as well they're gonna do all sorts of badass stuff together and well no let's know how awesome the s4 is or isn't I can't wait to watch it I kind of expected isn't imagine what was it I'm so I'm still saying if you guys can join live from the event you know that'll be great I just hope that they have an English presenter all right so uh thanks for thanks for watching everybody thanks for coming and tony from technician the guys behind chameleon thank you very much for answering all of our questions telling us all about chameleon too and i look forward to continuing to test it out on my droid DNA which I have a love-hate relationship with but it works great it's a 1080p phone and it looks good I like it well thank you very much for having me guys I really appreciate it it's great all right so Scott where can you find us out on those interwebs Google+ Google Plus page Andhra thority also YouTube you can watch us live comment there come on the Google+ page on the live post and we see all the comments and questions in our feeds also if you go to andrew authority calm scroll on the bottom right there's an on-air section after every show we do we do a little bit of a post a little bit of a summary of what's going on and what we talked about and also on soundcloud pond bean and itunes and we do have an RSS feed a little teaser here what is this I don't know but we are going to be giving away tell those stay tuned and or android authority I'll do that guys every night take care guys