Sensationalist title aside, this article will present our measurements of our app Colors! across 10 devices: Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation Vita, Microsoft Surface Pro, Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy Note, Samsung Galaxy Note 2, Samsung Galaxy S3, Google Nexus 10, and with special appearance by Nintendo DS and the Nintendo Wii U.

As I’ve posted before, Latency in video-games (and apps) is something I feel strongly about. While the benefit of low latency is easy to understand for video-games where the action is intense, it’s equally true for a painting apps like Colors!. Just try write to write your name on your average note-taking app, and you will see how high latency makes this so much harder than it should be. This video from Microsoft Labs shows that in an excellent way.
Continue reading Measuring latency in Colors! – Why game-devices are better for games than smart-phones →

I’m sorry to report that there are further delays with the Colors! 3D update. Nintendo found two more issues with our submission and have requested us to fix them before we can make the update available in the eShop. The first was a couple of situations where Colors! 3D didn’t behave as it should if the SD card was full and you re-ran the tutorial (or used a coloring page in the Portuguese version!). The second one was that sometimes the Paint With Friends feature would not connect if the one user had the original version of Colors! 3D and the other had the updated one. We’ve already submitted a new version, so now we are waiting Nintendo to look through it. Based on this, our new hope is to see the update in the store somewhere between 3-5 weeks from now. I’m terribly sorry about these delays – no one wants to see this update go live more than we do.

Continue reading Colors! 3D off-line changes and submission woes →

The eagerly awaited Colors! 3D update is still in submission with Nintendo. This is the part of the process where we have no control over the timing, so we sadly can’t give you any accurate information on when it will be released. It will probably somewhere between a 2-4 weeks, but that is just our guess. We were hoping that it would be out now, but Nintendo rejected our first submission as it had a number of small problems. On the plus-side, this makes the update a little bit better, so I hope you can still be patient a tiny bit longer.

I’ve mentioned tracing in a few of my previous development post, but I’ve never really gone into details on it. Tracing is probably the single most controversial issue in Colors! 3D. Half the gallery hates traced paintings, since they get so many likes and therefore drown out a lot of original works. On the other hand, the other half very much enjoys watching 3Difed copies of popular images.

Continue reading Colors! 3D and our thoughts on tracing →

With the big Colors! 3D update soon here, I wanted to talk about a major gallery addition that I haven’t touched on yet: Tags.

Being able to tag or categorize your paintings is something that we’ve experimented with before, but it never really worked out as we wanted. This time we’ve borrowed an idea from some other social networking sites and will try out using hashtags.

Continue reading #tags for Colors! 3D & Android gets Layers →

The holidays are upon us. Luckily for all you out there, we don’t have too many plans this year over here at Collecting Smiles HQ, so we keep working on the Colors! 3D update that we’ve promised to bring you – perhaps eating some delicious gingerbread cookies to get into the holiday spirit.

Here is the new Gallery front page and as you can see, it’s quite slimmed down compared to the current version. I talked about “Followers” previously, and this is where the new paintings from the artists you follow will show up – right front and center. And see the new icon in the bottom right corner? That is for notifications. Continue reading Browse, Search and Notifications →

It’s been a busy couple of weeks since the last blog-post. Time passes so quickly when you are heads down, crunching to get things ready as soon as they possibly can. But we have some good news! We have finally released the Colors! for Android. It’s pretty cool, and is finally a new device that runs Colors! and supports pressure-sensitivity, just like the original Colors! on Nintendo DS! Check out Colors! for Android here.

Continue reading Colors! Android released and more Colors! 3D info →

There are lots of things going on here at Collecting Smiles HQ, and I wanted to share some of that with you. Lately, we’ve been really focusing on getting an update for Colors! 3D out for the Nintendo 3DS, and I wanted to talk a little bit about that, but before we go into that I also wanted to mention:

Colors! is now available for PlayStation Vita!

We are still holding off on the official announcement as due to a snag: Continue reading Time for updates! →

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks, and I’ve realized that I never posted the big news here. Colors! 3D has a release date in the US (all of the Americas, really) and it is April 5. That’s tomorrow!

Continue reading Colors! 3D dev diary – Tomorrow we sail! →

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Colors! 3D Early Access Challenge. If you are a winner, you will be contacted as soon as we receive the Colors! 3D access codes. Have a good weekend!

A Colors! Facebook Friend: Kevin Castro Gonzalez
A Colors! Twitter Friend: @ZitzabisDeviant

Most popular painting: Brother’s Portrait by drawer_90

Continue reading Colors! 3D Early Access Challenge – results are in! →

Ok. Less chit-chat, more screenshots. Let’s look at the part of Colors! 3D you will see most of.

This is the most important screen in Colors! 3D. It instantly opens up when you press L or R. It’s all there: The color circle, the size / opacity sliders, the color preview box, and the three core brushes and the eraser. But see the tab bar at the bottom? These are the 5 tabs that expose all the key functionality when you are painting.

Continue reading Colors! 3D dev diary –The most important screenshots →