It will work with anything that delivers external power to the device — USB cable, power adapter, charging pod, whatever. It can be set to start and stop automatically, or can be started and stopped manually. If you lose power (i.e. sister turned off the switch to the outlet) after it started automatically, it will disappear and you’ll know. If you lose power after it was started manually, the central display changes from electric blue to shadow and the backlight stops pulsating, so you’ll know.

This wasn’t thought through fully before release, as the reviewer noticed, and once again it was just an impulsive app because I was always having to walk over and click and squint to know when I had enough charge to unplug and go out, and a few times I thought I was charging but didn’t notice the other end of the cord wasn’t plugged in or the outlet had no power because the plug-in indicator is miniscule, so delayed going out for nothing. But it’s true, because the input power is limited to what a USB port or pocket AC adapter can deliver (about 2.5 to 5W, my adapter is 3.5W), the more power the phone uses, the longer the charging time. Every phone I ever had charged faster when off than even when on standby, so for sure it’s got to be slower when the screen is on and the CPU is animating graphics.

However, I’ve been learning some things and am sure I can make it charge faster while still animating, though there will always be a trade-off between functionality and charging time. The best charging method depends on your situation, personally if I’m almost dead I turn the phone off and charge that way for 15-20 minutes to get some basic charge quick, then switch on and run the monitor the rest of the time, otherwise I keep wondering how it’s coming along. It could also overheat and I wouldn’t even know it, and that can reduce capacity and make it unstable and potentially dangerous.

P.S. If you turn off the central display items, that will speed the charging up… slightly, because it does consume some power to render those items. Those are non-essential anyway, the status is indicated by the color and bouncers.

I’ve been working on an update which is proving difficult in some respects, mainly due to the demands for better graphics and less power consumption being in direct conflict with one another. I’m doing my best to make it both look better and impact charging time less, and there are many cool things that could be done with this. I respect that some people think the concept is stupid, but it’s sold about 1300 copies so far and most customers like it.

As for the person who experienced a lock-up, the app does garbage collection when it exits to satisfy those who look for memory leaks, and when the system garbage collector is invoked it automatically cleans up after not only I Charge Cool, but everything else as well. It can take some time, but often is quite fast. If someone really did experience an unrecoverable lock-up, I wish they’d contacted me, because now I can’t diagnose and fix it if it’s a potential problem for all users.

http://jsbbblog.blogspot.com

I uninstalled it within 24 hours