Android users ahoy!, I need testers for my app! Options

[.:Cyb3rGlitch:.]

Ok, I've uploaded the latest build to the Market. You guys can grab it from the Dropbox. Just a minor change to the 'auto' indicator on the Dashboard.

Also, it turns out that Lux is #113 on the 'top paid tools' on the Android Market! Would be awesome to get into the top 100, so spread the word! :D

[.:Cyb3rGlitch:.]

Ok, largish update time! Check your Dropboxes!

The new experimental feature is 'dynamic period'. Instead of adjusting the brightness every X milliseconds, Lux monitors light readings in realtime, performs an Extra Special Algorithm^TM on the data, then adjusts the brightness instantly. Well, instantly if the brightness increases. If the brightness decreases, there's an intentional 2 second delay to combat jitter (and because lowering brightness has less priority than increasing it, especially under direct sunlight).

Give the new feature a try and let me know how it goes! :D

[@~thehung]

okay. firstly, well done on a tight, minimal, and attractive design. and kudos for being able to create an app AT ALL. i admire that skill greatly! :)

i would like to help more with feedback, but i need to know some things.


- what is this app actually for?

no really! ive only owned one smartphone so far, and with this particular phone at least, ive never wanted less than 100% brightness unless i was deliberately trying to save battery power. if one day i want to read in bed with the phone 3" from my face, i expect it would be most practical to lower brightness via the stock method by simply wiping a finger across the bar at the top of the screen. on that point though, i can see Lux being a useful alternative for setting a brightness level below the normal default range ('sub zero' style) for a one-off purpose or to save power when away from a recharge for lengthy periods. but i am having trouble imagining why anyone would find themselves going from light to dark in very specific circumstances and then regularly enough for automatic brightness switching to be of much use. am i doing it wrong? please explain.

- have you bitten off more than you can chew with regard to light metering limitations?

let me be clear: i am not trying to be defeatist or annoying. all the challenges of doing the best job possible are well worth the effort, especially if the app addresses needs. but what i have found so far (with my own phone at least) is the sensor data is all kinds of fucked up. in my case, the camera faces away from me and the light sensor towards me, a fact which poses many potentially difficulties on its own. but the lx values from the light sensor, either coming in as a stream from the phone's diagnostic mode, or through readings within Lux (using various combinations of filtering on/off and window sizes) is extremely variable. such that even in reasonably diffuse surrounds (free of beaming light sources and specular reflections) the values can change drastically with only a small change in the position of the phone. is my phone borked? i will get back to testing soon, but for the couple of days that i did try to use it properly, i couldnt get the program to work consistently. but, as i described earlier, its not as though i am totally sure of the correct goal/s when testing.

- how does the sensing work?

does the filter window correspond to an FFT window size and/or an integration time? how do you account for logarithmic scales? how much does one phone differ from the next?

- can you explain this sub-zero business, and why the brightness cant be set from 0-100% ?

this i dont understand. my experiments have only made me more confused. for example: i go into Lux (automatic adjustment off) and set the "Backlight zero point" to 1, and then use the slider on the dash to make the phone really fookin dark (near the very bottom of the sub-zero range) and then go into my phone's brightness settings where i find the bar sitting at 100% ('automatic brightness' off). as soon as i go to touch the slider, thats before i move it, the phone gets noticeably brighter, although its still quite dark. so i exit out without changing anything and go back into Lux, which shows the setting has jumped about 10% of the way from the far left towards the 'zero' point at the middle of the horizontal bar. okay...a little weird. but weirder still is what happens when i start moving the slider towards zero: the screen gets brighter and brighter (but not super bright) all the way up to and then past the zero point until about "10% backlight" at which point it goes back to quite dark again. wtf? btw, this happens independently of Lux's "override autobright" setting.

- do you have any plans to add a list or graph of linked samples?

although i am careful not to accumulate a whole mess of linked samples bordering on contradiction i find myself wondering about the effects of close-ish settings and how interpolation is performed. i end up having to wipe all values for the sake of clarity in testing, but i really want to be able to see how many samples ive made and where they are set. eg. see the pic below. also, if i was really greedy i would want to be able to re-arrange any of those values by tapping and dragging :P



This post has been edited by @~thehung: Dec 5 2011, 08:29 PM

[.:Cyb3rGlitch:.]

okay. firstly, well done on a tight, minimal, and attractive design. and kudos for being able to create an app AT ALL. i admire that skill greatly! :)

i would like to help more with feedback, but i need to know some things.


- what is this app actually for?

no really! ive only owned one smartphone so far, and with this particular phone at least, ive never wanted less than 100% brightness unless i was deliberately trying to save battery power. if one day i want to read in bed with the phone 3" from my face, i expect it would be most practical to lower brightness via the stock method by simply wiping a finger across the bar at the top of the screen. on that point though, i can see Lux being a useful alternative for setting a brightness level below the normal default range ('sub zero' style) for a one-off purpose or to save power when away from a recharge for lengthy periods. but i am having trouble imagining why anyone would find themselves going from light to dark in very specific circumstances and then regularly enough for automatic brightness switching to be of much use. am i doing it wrong? please explain.

There were two main goals when I originally started writing Lux. To save battery power (the backlight of a phone can easily be responsible for 50%+ of battery usage), and because I could never step out into the sun without facing a completely dark screen. I could have left it at 100%, but I hate reading bright displays, it strains my eyes. I wanted a better auto-brightness option, one that I could manually train in real-time, unlike solutions such as the one in Cyanogen where you need to train it in advance.

The finger swipe along the top is not a stock feature, it's a Samsung modification. That's nice too, but if you're in full sunlight, it may be difficult to type your pin to unlock your phone in the first place. Either way, the battery life improvements is what I was after first and foremost.

- have you bitten off more than you can chew with regard to light metering limitations?

let me be clear: i am not trying to be defeatist or annoying. all the challenges of doing the best job possible are well worth the effort, especially if the app addresses needs. but what i have found so far (with my own phone at least) is the sensor data is all kinds of fucked up. in my case, the camera faces away from me and the light sensor towards me, a fact which poses many potentially difficulties on its own. but the lx values from the light sensor, either coming in as a stream from the phone's diagnostic mode, or through readings within Lux (using various combinations of filtering on/off and window sizes) is extremely variable. such that even in reasonably diffuse surrounds (free of beaming light sources and specular reflections) the values can change drastically with only a small change in the position of the phone. is my phone borked? i will get back to testing soon, but for the couple of days that i did try to use it properly, i couldnt get the program to work consistently. but, as i described earlier, its not as though i am totally sure of the correct goal/s when testing.

Yeah, light sensors absolutely suck on all Android devices except my own, it would seem. I've tried at least a dozen different methods of getting sane results from terrible sensors, including using the camera as a backup, but it's still a work in progress. I've even considered buying a crippled device just so I can simulate a 'worst case scenario' user. Data filtering is probably the best solution I've got at this point, however I'm hoping that my dynamic period algorithm can be tweaked to achieve similar if not better results. I guess this is a challenge that I'm not yet willing to yield to.

- how does the sensing work?

does the filter window correspond to an FFT window size and/or an integration time? how do you account for logarithmic scales? how much does one phone differ from the next?

Not quite that spectacular, it's just a weighted average of all sensor events that occurred within the last X milliseconds. The weight is a function of time elapsed since initial boot. I didn't feel the need to work on this further, it seemed to be doing a decent job. As I said, I don't have a terrible phone to test with, so I rely on what my testers tell me.

I don't really account for logarithmic scales at this stage. The user links the brightness they desire to a lux value, and then they can choose from logarithmic or linear interpolation. That's about it.

Phones tend to be either really accurate (like mine, which I tested against a light meter in my physics lab at uni, and turns out to be accurate to within 1lx). Others phones tend to have about 5 or 6 fixed lux levels, and that is it.

- can you explain this sub-zero business, and why the brightness cant be set from 0-100% ?

this i dont understand. my experiments have only made me more confused. for example: i go into Lux (automatic adjustment off) and set the "Backlight zero point" to 1, and then use the slider on the dash to make the phone really fookin dark (near the very bottom of the sub-zero range) and then go into my phone's brightness settings where i find the bar sitting at 100% ('automatic brightness' off). as soon as i go to touch the slider, thats before i move it, the phone gets noticeably brighter, although its still quite dark. so i exit out without changing anything and go back into Lux, which shows the setting has jumped about 10% of the way from the far left towards the 'zero' point at the middle of the horizontal bar. okay...a little weird. but weirder still is what happens when i start moving the slider towards zero: the screen gets brighter and brighter (but not super bright) all the way up to and then past the zero point until about "10% backlight" at which point it goes back to quite dark again. wtf? btw, this happens independently of Lux's "override autobright" setting.

The reason you can't set it to 0% (and the reason the default zero point is 15%) is that some phone displays go absolutely nuts when set too dark. OLED displays in particular start changing their colour temperature below 10%. Other phones lock the phone at 0%, which is quite nasty.

As for your particular situation, when you set Lux to a sub-zero brightness, it's not actually touching the backlight at all. What it does is set the backlight to the 'zero' point, then puts a semi-transparent black overlay over the entire screen. This means the display can be set to virtually black, which I find very helpful during night-time use. This technically uses more power on LCD screens, but should save power on OLED screens.

There's also the fact that Lux only alters the system brightness when it is killed (either by compatibility mode, or by Android). When running, the brightness changes are local to Lux (although you as the user don't notice this). So when you went to check the system brightness, it was reading the last brightness value that was written to the system. When you changed this brightness, Lux didn't know, and kept the dark overlay on until you went back and slid to the 'zero' mark (which disables the overlay), then it set the local brightness to 1%, which overrides the system brightness.

The main reason Lux avoids writing to the system where possible is because it has an overhead attached. I absolutely hate laggy UI, or worse, apps that cause other apps to lag. So I've made Lux as lean as I could.

- do you have any plans to add a list or graph of linked samples?

although i am careful not to accumulate a whole mess of linked samples bordering on contradiction i find myself wondering about the effects of close-ish settings and how interpolation is performed. i end up having to wipe all values for the sake of clarity in testing, but i really want to be able to see how many samples ive made and where they are set. eg. see the pic below. also, if i was really greedy i would want to be able to re-arrange any of those values by tapping and dragging :P

http://i40.tinypic.com/igyrvc.jpg

You can already see a list of samples by either holding down the 'settings' icon on the Dashboard, or by selecting 'Modify linked samples' in settings. I'm probably not going to do a graph at this stage, it's just another layer of confusion for the end user. You can always tip your phone to the side and pretend the sample editor bars are a graph of sorts. :P

Anyway, I hope that answers your questions!

This post has been edited by .:Cyb3rGlitch:.: Dec 5 2011, 09:58 PM

[@~thehung]

yes, thoroughly happy with those answers for now! thanks :D

[p0is0n]

just wanted to update this thread to say that i've not had any problems over the last month or so with the app.
the battery usage does still report high, but I can regularly go more than 2 days without charging and have noticed, if anything, increase battery life recently.

my housemate has an LG optimus I am not sure if you have any testers of that model yet (not common in aus?) or if you require any..

[.:Cyb3rGlitch:.]

The more the merrier. Feel free to give him copies of the .apk, or I can add him to the dropbox.

[2SHY]

Vito, if its not too much trouble, i would like to test your application for you. I frequently change the brightness on my phone and feel i cannot do it accurately. Thanks.

This post has been edited by 2SHY: Dec 17 2011, 06:46 PM

[NukeJockey]

Now that I have a droid, I wouldn't mind helping test it too.

Fuck it. I just paid for it.

[.:Cyb3rGlitch:.]

Vito, if its not too much trouble, i would like to test your application for you. I frequently change the brightness on my phone and feel i cannot do it accurately. Thanks.

Sure, just send me your dropbox e-mail.

Now that I have a droid, I wouldn't mind helping test it too.

Fuck it. I just paid for it.

Thanks. :)

[NukeJockey]

So of that .99c, how much do you get?

[.:Cyb3rGlitch:.]

69c

[.:Cyb3rGlitch:.]

I need someone who has problems side-loading apps when 'compatibility mode' is disabled in Lux. I've got an extra special build that may solve the issue.

This post has been edited by .:Cyb3rGlitch:.: Dec 18 2011, 02:35 AM

[.:Cyb3rGlitch:.]

New update in Dropbox:

- Can now modify compatibility mode to include any installed application you want
- Prompts to convert between lux/luma and 'brightness levels' when switching between advanced/simple mode
- Reverted compat mode to old system (turns out that it still blocked sideloading)
- Easier to access Dashboard via Widget (no more clicking a bazillion times trying to open it)
- Persistent notification shows brightness value and whether Lux is in compatibility mode
- New 'sub-zero only' mode for people that want to automate sub-zero but retain their ROMs auto-brightness system
- Fixed bug where logarithmic interpolation actually applies linear, and vice versa
- Advanced tweaking of 'dynamic period' delays in settings.
- Dashboard will automatically adjust brightness when it is opened and closed if 'adjust automatically' is enabled. Otherwise it will not.

[.:Cyb3rGlitch:.]

Haven't posted in here for a while. Here's some recent changes:

- Improved camera concurrency code
- Updated tutorial content
- Can now navigate tutorial by swiping
- Fixed rare internal concurrent access bug
- Fixed compat mode list crashing because Android decides not to populate the installed app list...
- Added feedback button to settings page
- Fixed nullpointerexception on some devices
- Added service to resume Lux if broadcast intents fail
- Fixed threading issue which causes Dynamic Period to never adjust
- Fixed camera mode not being allowed with 'adjust on wake' mode
- Memory and CPU usage improvements
- Fixed bug where enabling Lux via Dashboard doesn't start services
- Fixed Dashboard stuck on 'reading...' bug
- Dynamic compat mode to save battery
- Tweaked defaults settings
- Fixed crash on boot bug
- Can now enable/disable Lux in settings
- Performance and battery usage tweaks

Any of you still using Lux?

[NightOwl]

Yep, it still resides on my phone, happily doing its thing in the background. Haven't updated in a while, so just did so. First off, I like the new widget control. I can delete the extra dashboard link now. In fact, lux still appears to work without the home page widget if I have notifications, longevity and auto mode active. Is that right ? Or have i inadvertantly deactivated something. I like the little sun on my notification bar and it frees up home page real estate, which is important on small displays :)

[.:Cyb3rGlitch:.]

You don't need longevity enabled unless you've been having issues with Android killing Lux. There's actually a bug with it at the moment where it doesn't adjust the brightness value in the notification.

Removing the widget is perfectly fine, it has no real importance any more.

[Opy]

Ah, I recently got my first Android device. Forgot all about your app. Just purchased it now. Will need to experiment a little outside of my dark corner office.

[NightOwl]

You don't need longevity enabled unless you've been having issues with Android killing Lux. There's actually a bug with it at the moment where it doesn't adjust the brightness value in the notification.

Removing the widget is perfectly fine, it has no real importance any more.

Yes, I noticed that notification bug today. Glad you mentioned it, thought it was me ... :)

[p0is0n]

still using it, as with NightOwl just plugging away in the background, hasn't caused any issues.
will grab the latest build and keep using it. cheers.