Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Introducing Comic Cover Muzei

If you own an Android phone you should know about the wonderful new live wallpaper app, Muzei coded by Roman Nurik. I was hooked on it from day one. You see Muzei automatically downloads and sets a new wallpaper image for you every day. By default the app will download art curated by Roman's fiancée. The first image it showed was van Gogh "The Starry Night" which is one of my favourite paintings and I'm getting a chance to see it at MOMA this summer but I digress.

After I downloaded the app I was reminded of a blog post by my buddy Raymond Camden. In the post on the Marvel Comic's API, Ray shows how to query the Marvel database and display covers. So I decided to combine chocolate and peanut butter into one awesome combination.

The Muzei app provides a way to write an extension to provide a new data source. So what I've done is to create an extension that randomly picks a Marvel Comic book cover and sets it as your wallpaper. It's called Comic Cover Muzei.


Select the data source


Set your options


Enjoy your art

Right now you can set an option to only download the images over wifi if you are worried about bandwidth usage and you can set the refresh interval from 3 to 24 hours. I've got plans to add more options to allow you to pick the character or series to pull the images from. 

Also, right now the app only uses Marvel Comic covers but I'd love to add other companies like DC, Image, etc.



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4 comments:

  1. Raymond CamdenFebruary 26, 2014 at 7:59 AM

    Just an FYI, your webp images don't work outside of Chrome.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Simon MacDonaldFebruary 26, 2014 at 10:00 AM

    @Raymond Camden

    Thanks for the heads up. I'm pretty much living in Chrome these days and didn't realize. I fixed the images and updated the blog post.

    ReplyDelete
  3. LouieJJune 7, 2016 at 10:09 AM

    Hi Simon, do you have any plans to bring back the Comic Covers extension? It's no longer available for download in the Play Store :(

    ReplyDelete
  4. Simon MacDonaldJune 7, 2016 at 10:36 AM

    @LouieJ nope because I got a takedown notice. I'm pretty tired of using other people's API's and then getting your app shut down when another part of the company notices it, even when you are following the rules.

    ReplyDelete