Watching painting playbacks are cool, but it has always been bugging us that there haven’t been any good tools to export those playbacks as videos. If you ran the original version of Colors! for Nintendo DS, you could use the ColorsDraw tool, but we stopped supporting that quite a while ago and it doesn’t work on newer versions of Colors! (like Colors! 3D). So we are very happy to announce the video export feature for Colors! for Android.

If you are running the full version of Colors! on an Android device running at least 4.1 (Jelly Bean), you can now export any painting playback as a video-file. In the future, we hope to bring this functionality to Colors! for iOS and perhaps more importantly, to allow this directly from colorslive.com, but for now this is an Android 4.1 exclusive feature.

This update also brings Colors! for Android up to par in terms of gallery features, where all the good things that Colors! 3D user have been using for a while, like followers, search and tags, are now available.

Colors! for iOS has also received a nice update which includes the reference photo features that I know many of you have been missing.

Enjoy!

We are very happy to announce that Colors! is now available for the iPad. This is being released as an upgrade to Colors! for iPhone, which can now be downloaded as a universal app in the App Store. To celebrate this, Colors! will be on sale for $2.99 for the next two weeks. We are also putting Colors! for Android on sale for $2.99, so all the Android users out there does not feel left out. So take this opportunity to give your smartphone or tablet with some Colors! love.

 Colors! for iPhone and iPad now includes:

Continue reading Major Colors! iOS update. Sale on iOS and Android →

Wow! There were over 2000 submissions to the #painttheworld contest. It took some time for us to look through them all. We were also blown away by the quality of the submissions. There were so many great ideas with fantastic execution. You have no idea how much agony this caused us when trying to pick the winners.

First place, and winner of the Nintendo Wii U Console Deluxe Set, goes to Widder. Congratulations!

We’ve finally got the go-ahead by Nintendo to release our big Colors! 3D update and it will be available in the eShop on April 5 absolutely free. We can’t tell you how excited we are about this – there are so many features that we’ve been waiting for you to get your hands on. Just look at this list:

Continue reading Colors! 3D update available on April 5 – Celebrate by winning a Wii U™ console →

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 →