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Comment by rocketsloth | Hacker News Reader

Thanks so much really appreciate your support! I experimented with an ios style parallax effect on the background stars but found that the library really used a lot of memory so I removed it for the time being. It looked super cool though so I'm going to try and write it myself in the near future. I'm also really interested in animations for the stars and a swirling nebula. My animation abilities are almost non-existent right now, but it's something I want to work on asap. That clock widget is super cool, Ive got a lot of features in the Todo list ATM but a widget is on the radar eventually too :). Really appreciate the feedback

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On a OnePlus 2 with LineageOS 14.1 it gobbled 146 MB of RAM max. How much more did the parallax lib add? Possibly hiding it behind an option with a warning would be viable?

Animating everything would also be nice. You've already did an awesome job on the UI overall ;).

I've seen much worse stuff from established apps on the Play Store. Worked on one even. The designers had the displeasure of doing glorified skinning. On top of that there was a lot of bike shedding around buttons but pretty much everyone ignored the dark patterns that were dictated from the top ("Hooked" had to be our new Bible, thankfully we didn't have to read it except for a 4 page snippet explaining the addiction loop we would want to exploit).

I only ever tested the parallax library on a very early build of the app which consumed far less ram overall just cause the app wasn't finished yet, so it's hard to give an exact amount. If ever I did any serious animation work and parallax backgrounds I'd leave the option to disable it for users who don't want it or find it impacts performance. I'd also have to do extensive testing with any third party library for parallax cause it's so vital they release sensors properly and without fail when they are no longer needed to conserve battery. I'd love to work on animations in the future cause I think that's one of the areas the app needs the most improvement in and thank you for the complement on the UI.

All I was able to find fast was this:

https://github.com/nvanbenschoten/motion a bit outdated, not sure if it will work

https://github.com/material-motion/material-motion-android a bit fresher, but development stopped halfway through

> I'd also have to do extensive testing with any third party library for parallax cause it's so vital they release sensors properly and without fail when they are no longer needed to conserve battery.

Looking at what's available I'm not sure if it wouldn't be better to re-implement a lib for that. You could pass on extensive testing IF you find a lib that's already used in another project.

Consider introducing new features like Sleep for Android does (a popup with a change list displayed on 1st run after an update). With this you could try moving users to the "Experimental" settings section. Note that having solid issue reporting from the app would immensely help then.

Another approach would be to set up a beta program for experimental stuff. Not sure which one would be more cost-effective, needs more investigation.

Hey sorry for responding so late. Thanks for sharing those libraries, I'll take a look at both. The one i used before was actually quite tough to find and I remember it wasn't a very popular one. I have a release notes list now implemented in the app (as of about an hour ago) and I think i'm going to try the parallax thing soon cause you're really tempting me haha. I really like the idea of experimental settings and think I'm going to do it that way.

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