02 February 2008

ShakeLock Video Demonstration

It is the question if our lovely phones could survive so much shaking but accelerometer technology and motion based applications getting real hot in demand nowadays.

As you may have already know Nokia N95 features Accelerometer (also known as Level or Tilt Sensor) but until now it wasn’t used that much, actually it was used only by the camera application to rotate pictures in the right position as I have already pointed in my Nokia N95 review.

Probably pushed by the huge success of the iPhone, Nokia has released the necessary API few months ago and made it easy for independent developers to take advantage of motion sensing, to take the most from the build in hardware and to change the way we use technology.

The mighty Mr. Samir was the first one who recognized the huge potential of the motion sensors on Symbian S60 platform that is open for new features and features that we got lately simply rocks. This very creative and very talented French developer came with a few very creative and very useful accelerometer based applications, applications like RotateMe, NokMote and the ShutUp.

Then came Damian, Python expert, another talented developer with some fresh ideas and few extremely cool application that brought lot of fun in a usually boring Symbian world, pyPiwo, pyRybka, pyMoneta and pyPoziomica, it is really hard to say which one I like the most.

Finally Tong Ren has introduced his first motion based application a month ago, FlipSilent soft that brought first sign of competition to Samir’s work and he is just showing off his upcoming ShakeSMS soft.

Oh, I can’t believe that I almost forget to mention Asier Arranz and his great NiiMe Mouse and NiiMe Wheel software that allowing us to use our phones on a completely new way. Those applications are using the built-in accelerometer to detect the movements of the phone and transfer it to the PC over Bluetooth where the PC client application decode the input and allows you to control the mouse cursor on your PC.

Anyway, let’s go back to the main point of this article; I am so honoured to introduce a new author and his very first application. Manu Krishnan has made a simple Python application, another “shaker” with a very basic functionality. Although application is still under heavy development he gave me a privilege to introduce soft to public mainly to get a feedback and to see dose it worth further development and improving.

As I said it is the very simple application with a very basic functionality, it locks and unlocks the phone by recognizing the phone movement, up/down is equivalent for locking while the left/right shaking unlocks the phone. That's pretty much all the app does, but it does it well and therefore I tend to disagree with those who will say for what it’s worth or that it is as useful as iPhone.

Sure it is maybe pointless on the slider phones like Nokia N95, but if you have lazy fat fingers or you hate the small Nokia N82 keys I am pretty sure that you love it. Especially considering that Manu working on further improvements and implementing the sensitivity settings.

I’ve made a short video demonstration to show how it looks like in the practice because application still isn’t available for the public. The final public version should be available next week but if you just can’t wait and if you would like to test it out and give some feedback just drop me an email or even better put the request over at our forum section and I’ll see what I can do.