Living Worlds: October!

Autumn has come, and the leaves are changing!

The October Living Worlds scene is unusual, in that it’s different at different times of the month. The leaves start out green at the beginning of the month, and turn bright red by the end of the month. The moon is visible, and it changes phase in time with the moon in the real world. There’s a spooky castle, and there are different kinds of hauntings, influenced by the phase of the moon. In the original Seize the Day app, this was all set up to work with the phases of the moon as they were in October 1993, but for the new mobile app I wanted it to work for whatever month and year you happen to have it running in. Getting it all to play nice together involved a bit of puzzle solving, as well as some help from Mark, but I’m pleased with how it’s come together!

I also added a small new feature… I’ve heard from a number of people that have set the app up as a permanent picture frame on a device they are otherwise not using. Some of them wanted it to always show the time, to have it do double duty as a clock. So, now you can do just that (if you turn it on in the Settings)!

I know there are lots of other feature requests, and I haven’t been getting to them as quickly as I’d like… Just putting the scenes together has turned out to be quite a good deal of work! I can’t promise I’ll get to all the requests, but I am keeping a list and hope to get to more of them at some point.

And of course there’s the unfortunate “Android blackout” bug. Hopefully everyone’s devices have updated to Chrome/WebView 77 by now and that issue should be a thing of the past… If you’re still having trouble with it, please let me know.

Happy October, time of changes!