Category Archives: Announcements

General news about the Seven+ Project and its activities. Everything from other projects or applications that we would like to bring to your attention to places we have been featured, or just something we think you should know.

Showing Support

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As if we hadn’t made supporting us easy enough, we are adding one more way you can profess your appreciation for our efforts through a donation using WePay. They make it simple, easy, and very public. Contributing any amount $5 USD and over will also get you a spot on our List of Contributors! For those of you looking for a little something in return for your support, we are also selling “I ♥ 7+ Android” t-shirts on SpreadShirt. As always we thank those who have supported us in the past, it is much appreciated. For all those consider supporting us, just give our applications a try and consider even a small contribution if you would like to see more updates and more apps to come. Thanks again and happy coding!

Have Pride

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Often times we look at out applications and think how much further we have to go. We notice all of the features missing, all of the bugs, and the differences in responsiveness compared to the applications that inspire us. Try as we may, the glass is always half empty.

Today we are encouraging everyone to join us and have pride, the glass is in fact half full! We want to show everyone what we have done and not what we still have to do.

Full screenshot of Launcher7

Launcher7 is our oldest application available on Google Play so it is only reasonable that it is also our most established. Here is a full-scale panoramic screenshot of Launcher7 running on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Widget tiles, app tiles, folders, notification counter tiles, contact tiles, and more and displayed, each just a swipe away! The top status bar is another of our apps, StatusBar+. The result: a seamless, highly-customizable WP7 experience. The custom status bar is a built-in feature of Launcher7 as well for those who do not need the same level of customization. A swipe to the right reveals an app drawer with the option for indexing so that two clicks is all you need to reach any app. All this under $2.

ZPlayer Panoramic Home Screen

Our second oldest application is ZPlayer and with age comes wisdom. It is a highly-refined music experience like no other. It has a simple, smooth user experience and features every music junkie will love. Even the largest collection is no match as the panoramic home screen allows for quick navigation to what you care about while jumpviews make getting around albums and artists a breeze. It integrates with services like last.fm to provide amazing, high-quality images, album art, and artist biographies. The features are endless and the best way to understand is to experience it yourself.

The Seven+ Calculator

Although many users take this for granted, we take every detail seriously. The Seven+ Calculator is not even a year old and yet it is loved by many and packs more features than the original inspiring app. It is the perfect calculator for any user, offering advanced trigonometric functions along with simple percent operations. Whether you need to calculate a tip or the angle of an physics problem, The Seven+ Calculator works for you. That, and it looks great doing it. Did we also forget to mention, it is completely free!

Want to show your support and get an awesome t-shirt? We’ve uploaded the “I Love Seven+ Android” design to SpreadShirt. We get a $2.39 commission on each shirt sold so it is a great way to show your support and tell everyone about us. As always thank you and happy coding!

The Seven+ Project on AndroidPit

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AndroidPit Logo

After much anticipation a number of our applications including Launcher7, StatusBar+, and The Seven+ Calculator, are available on AndroidPit! This will allow our users who want to purchase and support our applications via PayPal to do so. We have never used this service before but have had a pleasant experience thus far with uploading our applications. To bear with us as we get used of a new system and if you were previously unable to purchase our application due to a lack of a credit card this should help.

StatusBar+ Roadmap

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After some healthy discussion on Google+ we have come to realize that, while release dates are detrimental to the overall development process, roadmaps provide a similar level of transparency without the same amount of responsibility. We do not provide release dates because users tend to get upset when we are unable to meet them. On the other hand, scheduled updates give the user a sense of what is to come and an assurance that development has not ceased.

With that said, here is what we have regarding StatusBar+. It began as the custom status bar for ANY Android device, rooted or not, and done WP7-style. As we look to expand our user base we have added support for notifications and improved stability immensely. Now we are turning out attention toward customizations.

StatusBar+ Backup And Restore Functionality

StatusBar+ Backup/ Restore

The next version of StatusBar+ will be called orchid, continuing with the flower-based version naming seen alongside ChargeBar and The Seven+ Calculator. It will consist mostly of internal improvements and optimizations, but as a number of new features:

  • Specific support for SMS and MMS.
  • Data Synchronization and external storage backup/ restore functionality.
  • Notifications that can be swiped to the left and right with configurable actions (like open, dismiss, and more).
  • 3D MetroUI-style animations.
StatusBar+ During Animation

StatusBar+ mid-animation

While these may sound great, we did not want to stop there. Users often suggest that we add different themes because they are just not fans of the Windows Phone 7 UI. Sacrificing a few customizations like the ability to set the background & icon color to whatever your heart desires, we look to add support for third-party themes in an upcoming release. This will give the theme control over what images to use for what indicators as well as their positions and styles. An API based on the AOSP SystemUI code would allow ROM status bar themes to be easily ported as APKs and installed on the user’s device. They would be given a list of all installed applications and after a quick restart of the app, be able to change the theme of their status bar on-the-fly.

With all of that said, we still need your feedback on improving StatusBar+ and StatusBar+ Lite. Let us know what you would like to see, and let us know how we can make the first custom status bar for ANY Android device, rooted or not, into the custom status bar!

Thanks again for your support and we look forward to hearing your suggestions!

StatusBar+ Lite Passes 100,000 Downloads

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StatusBar+ Logo

In honor of StatusBar+ Lite passing 100,000 downloads on Google Play we are putting out an update today. It offers more customizations, better performance & signal/ network detection, 1% battery increments for Motorola devices, and a GPS/ language combination indicator. Let us know what you think and be on the look out for the update today, or if you just cannot wait screenshots are available on Google+. We hope that you will enjoy it, and if possible consider purchasing the full version of StatusBar+.

Apptopia

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Just this past week I sold one of my applications, Ice Cream Sandwich Calculator, on Apptopia. It was a port of the Android 4.0 calculator application to Android 2.1 Eclair up to Android 2.3 Gingerbread. I must admit that the process went quite smoothly and was surprised to discover that transferring applications between developer accounts is actually quite easy!

If you are a developer interested in earning some up-front cash for your applications check them out. It doesn’t cost a thing to list your application and believe it or not you can even turn a profit on free applications! They are still in their initial phase of launch so the interface does take a bit of time to get used to, but this is definitely being improved upon. Fortunately email support from one of their founding members, Jonathan Kay, is amazing. If you are skeptical just shoot him an email with a list of questions, I’m sure he’ll be glad to walk you through the process.

Note: the APK for ICS Calculator as of this blog post can be found here on our website for those without access to Google Play, and the sale does not affect the open source nature of the application. Source code is still freely available on GitHub.

Android Feature Request (Notification Dismissal)

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Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Status Bar

ICS Status Bar

Issue 23106 proposes to add the ability for applications to know when notifications have been dismissed in the status bar. Pretty simple, but such a feature is absolutely crutial in the development of applications like StatusBar+ and Laucher7. Such a feature would allow for StatusBar+ to include in-bar notifications like the stock status bar, or Launcher7 to display the notification unread message count next to any application be it Gmail, Facebook, or what have you without special permissions, root access, or polling a server. In general this feature will make Android a better platform for developers and users alike, which is why we are asking everyone to take a moment and star this issue. Together we can change Android for the better!