FlyScreen Blog

We’re excited to release FlyScreen for Android v2.5 today! This release features a pretty big redesign for us, including a more unified look for our RSS powered widgets (for branded and unbranded) and use of the new Android menu system (how awesome, right??).

Enjoy the screenshots, and go download FlyScreen now!

Yea, that’s right! It took us too long (we’re sorry!), but themes will work once again in FlyScreen!

If you’d like to get started on yours, head over to our themes documentation.

There are two starter themes in the market now, and we’re looking forward to seeing many more!

-Team FlyScreen

We’ve been aware for some time of the issues in replacing the default Android lock screen properly. Aside from the amazing UI and great feature set FlyScreen offers, the ability to properly replace the system lock screen with FlyScreen remains quite the challenge. Though we feel we have hacked together some great solutions, we still strive to offer a perfectly seamless and secure user experience.

The reality is that the current implementation is not one we are 100% happy with. Therefore, it is with great feelings of responsibility to our amazing user base that we will be offering “Lock Screen” and “Non-Lock Screen” modes in FlyScreen for now, until we can implement a solution we are happy with. This means, if you find the lock screen implementation disruptive, you will easily be able to shut it off, while being able to enjoy everything else that FlyScreen offers. No need to uninstall- you’ll be able to manually open and close it.

Lock-screen mode will still be optional, and you’ll be free to enable it as you wish. We’ll still be working as hard as possible with our friends at Google to better integrate FlyScreen into the Android experience. (And feel free to give out Tweet your Beef campaign another shot!)

This isn’t a step we wanted to take, but feel it’s necessary under the circumstances. User experience is of utmost importance to us, and we believe more people will be able to enjoy FlyScreen in the meantime, until a better solution is reached. Thank you all for your ongoing support, and we hope to have great news in the near future!

-Team FlyScreen

That’s right! We’re excited to announce that FlyScreen for Android supports native Android widgets. Yep, that’s right- you can now build your own FlyScreen widget using the tools in the Android SDK.

We have outlined guidelines for best practises, regarding screen sizes, naming conventions, etc. here in our developer documentation.

For example, now you can take any homescreen widget, like this AndroidGuys.com one, and put it on your FlyScreen. It will even function like normal, as you can see, with full article previews!

We’re really excited to see some great new widgets for FlyScreen! Show us what you build, and we’ll feature it at http://www.myflyscreen.com/developers

Enjoy!

-Team FlyScreen

We’re aware of a current issue with Facebook connect and the Facebook widget on FlyScreen. Facebook made some changes to the Stream API (http://developers.facebook.com/live_status.php#msg_598), and we’re working hard on pushing out a fix. (And apparently, we’re not the only ones )

Hang tight, a fix is coming soon! We’ll post here and on Twitter when it’s up.

-Team FlyScreen

**Update**

And we’re back! Should be working now, go check it out!

Special thanks to @heartlessjez @markjeffrey and @twiandroid for having us on!

We field a ton of feedback email, and a growing size of them are asking us “Why can’t I see FlyScreen in the market?” Unfortunately, it’s because we dropped support for Android 1.5 a few weeks ago. It was simply too difficult for us to achieve our product goals while still supporting 1.5, especially with all the great features available in 1.6 (donut) and higher.

Therefore, let it be known that FlyScreen for Android only supports Android 1.6 and higher, and that’s why you’re not seeing FlyScreen in your market app. Again, we’re sorry for this, but it’s just how we nee to do it! Here’s to hoping that there will be a great solution to this fragmentation problem, and that all you 1.5-ers get updated soon!

-Team FlyScreen

If you’re scrolling through a long widget, why not make it full screen and lock it into place? It’s easy! Just do an extended press on an item to enter full screen, and another to go back to regular size.

Enjoy!

-Team FlyScreen

An interesting report was brought to our attention, highlighting a statistic that helps reinforce why we all need some more FlyScreen in our lives!

According to a Pew Internet Study entitled “Understanding the Participatory News Consumer“, “Some 46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms on a typical day.”

This was a main part of our hypothesis going in to building FlyScreen. If people usually go to the same 5 or 6 sites for their info, why not let them embed it on their lock screen, so they can access it instantly, and have it “surfed”/updated for them?

Another interesting tidbit is the following chart:

The breakdown of this chart is almost like the breakdown of the popularity of FlyScreen widgets. Weather, news and social are in our top 5 most popular, with Weather being in first by far.

We’re loyal Loaded viewers, thanks to @natalidelconte for this tip!

-Team FlyScreen