Flickbook update

Flickbook has been updated to use OpenGL ES.

I uploaded a Flickbook app to the Android Market a couple of weeks ago. The main goal was to experiment with UI design, including using selectors to animate list selections. I was also exploring Processing for Android for it's potential to display graphics in Android. However, I discovered that as a developer this was more trouble than it was worth: using OpenGL ES directly would be a more sensible option.

I gained a little experience in using OpenGL ES when creating a Fur Simulation app, also on the Android Market. As OpenGL ES is tricky to work with, I decided to get some more practice by integrating this into the Flickbook app, with the goal of flicking between images more quickly. This is demonstrated in the update. Note: one of the bothers of OpenGL is that image dimensions must be a power of 2 (e.g. 512x256px) and, as such, any previously made flickbooks will be incompatible unless you manually resize the images yourself.

Another problem I came across in the previous version was that the Camera Intent would store images in the default camera directory alongside the Flickbook app storing them in it's own directory, causing duplicate images on the sdcard. To get around this, the app calls the ContentResolver to delete the Uri returned by the Intent once the image has been saved. This works on my Hero device but this morning I spotted a null pointer exception has been reported since the update - I'll have a look at this tonight!