Melbourne-based developers Dylan McGannon and Ry Van Veluwen pinged us this morning to let us know about their new app, VinePaper. Guys, you have our attention.
VinePaper is a simple Live Wallpaper that downloads and plays a Vine video in the background of your homescreen (and lockscreen, depending on your phone). Repeatedly. Constantly. This could be a blessing or a curse, depending on who you follow on Vine.
As a 99-cent app, it’s a bit of harmless throwaway fun. My homescreen has now a looping animation of Spongebob Squarepants going a little bit crazy – for which, I salute Ry and Dylan. Mind you, there are far better and subtler Vine videos out there and the app comes with a default Vine set that features an animated Android figure.
The only problem I can see at the moment is the difficulty of actually getting the URL of a Vine you like out of the Vine app – it’s actually easier to go to Twitter, find a Vine URL and share it (although this is more Vine’s fault than Dylan’s – it doesn’t seem to use Android’s system-wide sharing API). Perhaps in the future the app might gain the ability for someone to share a Tweet to VinePaper and extract the URL, as an easier way to get a Vine into your wallpaper.
The app could probably also do with some variable speed playback controls, as many Vine videos feature pretty frantic activity in their 6 second limit and I’d love to not have a seizure when I hit the home button. It’s also likely doing nothing for my battery life, but hey – that’s the price you pay for a bit of Spongebob in your life. 😉
[app]com.dylan.vinepaper[/app]
