gesture - Android Police - Android News, Apps, Games, Phones, Tablets

Dec

RockPlayer v2 Comes Out Sporting A Brand New UI, Sharing Between Devices, Gesture Control And More

Posted by Eric Ravenscraft in Applications, News

Forget all those people streaming their movies from the likes of Netflix and Hulu. You like to have a proper collection of video files. You want to own them and watch them wherever you want. RockPlayer, the all-purpose media player app for Android, has been a crowd favorite for just this purpose for a while, even if it's been lacking a bit of luster. Well, today that changes with a huge update to the interface that makes it both prettier and far more functional.

Have a look at the before and after:

^Before

As you can see, the old version is all Gingerbread-y and has a god awful, ugly interface for exploring videos with no indication of what you're about to play besides the name.

Oct

iKnowU Keyboard Offers Phrase Prediction, Next Letter Highlights And Gestures To Make You A More Efficient Typist

Posted by Eric Ravenscraft in Applications, News

There are no shortage of keyboard replacements on the market. Between SwiftKey, Swype, and the various manufacturer-skinned versions, you can't help but have three or four options on your phone. Today's latest entrant, iKnowU, still manages to stand out with the ability to predict entire phrases and highlighting of the next letters it thinks you're going to type. Pretty impressive.

http://youtu.be/IGPaEAnMuAg

Of course, the feature that catches our eye most of all is phrase prediction. SwiftKey is widely known for its next-word anticipation engine that aims to guess what you want to write next. iKnowU take this one step further, recognizing that words are just one building block of language.

Jul

[New App] Sudo QuickLaunch Replaces Jelly Bean's Google Search Swipe Gesture With A List Of Your Favorite Apps

Posted by Liam Spradlin in Applications, Jelly Bean 4.1, News

Sudo Make Me An App has just released Sudo QuickLaunch to the Play Store, an app that handily replaces Google Search's swipe-up gesture in Jelly Bean with a list of your favorite apps.

If you're like me, you hit the search bar in Jelly Bean more often than you swipe up to get to Google Search, so Sudo QuickLaunch is a welcome addition that not only makes that gesture useful, but can keep your home screen clutter-free. Plus, those wanting swipe-up access to Google Search can place the Search app in their QuickLaunch tray.

Besides its functionality, one of the benefits of Sudo's new app is that it is simple – it works exactly how you'd expect, is ad-free, and requires absolutely no special permissions.

Jul

Switcher Provides An Incredible Gesture-Based App Switching Tool

Posted by Liam Spradlin in Applications, News

Vito Cassisi, the developer behind a piece of software that could potentially revolutionize the way Android users switch between apps, updated Switcher today.

Working on the principle that swiping gestures are naturally more satisfying (from a UX standpoint) than press-and-wait actions (a la Android's multitasking button), Switcher's functionality is entirely based on the utilization of universal swipe gestures to switch between running apps (or all apps).

According to the developer, the concept was first imagined when studying on the train, desperately wishing for a way to switch between notes and web that was faster than using home or back buttons.

Those concerned that the vertical "add" and "remove" gestures can rest assured that Switcher's pre-defined swipe zones (which rest fairly high on the screen) will almost never interfere with normal in-app scrolling.

Mar

[Update: v2.0] GestureControl Gives Rooted Users Universal, Customized, Multitouch Control Of Their Tablet

Posted by Liam Spradlin in Applications, News, Tablets

Last Updated: April 29th, 2012

One of the great advantages of using a tablet device is its display. Having a big, bright touch display allows for enhanced media enjoyment, browsing, and gaming. Logically, a large touch display should make heavy use of touch controls, implementing at least some level of universal functionality to unify the touch-centric interface a tablet display begs for. Looking to bring this idea to fruition, Good Mood Droid created GestureControl, an app that allows rooted users to control their tablet using a variety of multitouch gestures.

GestureControl, as you can see from the video above, allows users to hide Honeycomb's status bar in any app, at any time, and also allows basic system navigation using simple gestures.

Oct

[Review] Car Tunes Makes It Easy To Keep Your Eyes On The Road While Finding The Perfect Justin Bieber Song

Posted by Brad Ganley in App Reviews, Applications, Apps/Games, Reviews

Every once in a while, an app comes along that revolutionizes the Android experience in an unimaginable way. More often, though, we get apps that simply regurgitate the same thing we've seen a thousand times before but with a different colored title bar or some such minor adjustment. A happy medium between the two, however, is necessary to the advancement of the platform. Perhaps the most important type of app is one that provides the functionality that we've been using the whole time but solidly improves how it is done. Car Tunes is just that type of application.

Car Tunes is one of the simplest apps I've ever seen.

Sep

Captain Unobvious Tip: New Facebook For Android Has Swipe-To-Delete For Wall Posts And Comments, Swipe-To-Archive For Messages

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, News, Tips & Tutorials

If you belong to the dying breed of people still using Facebook (at least that's what everyone on Google+ seems to think), I think you will find today's tip quite handy, to say the least.

As it turns out, you can actually delete wall posts and comments (on your own wall or ones you created) as well as archive messages all by swiping away the item in question. Both left-to-right and right-to-left gestures seem to work, though left-to-right is a bit more reliable and natural.

Note: The gesture doesn't work everywhere - for example, it didn't work when I tried to swipe away a post by page (Android Police), probably because it still uses the old layout.

Aug

Tip: ASUS Transformer's Dock Supports Scrolling, Swiping, And Pinch-To-Zoom - Just Use Two Fingers

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in ASUS, Eee Pad Transformer, Tips & Tutorials

Last week, I traded my Google I/O Chromebook for an ASUS Eee Pad Transformer/keyboard dock combo and started exploring the fascinating laptop/tablet hybrid. Overall, my impressions so far are more positive than I thought they would be, and I'll most likely end up selling the 3G XOOM that has none of the features the Transformer with the dock have to offer. The only problem with the Transformer that I've experienced is a relatively poor battery life compared to both the XOOM and the Tab 10.1, which I can't explain yet... but I'm getting carried away.

After my exploration of the Transformer was complete, I noted 2 annoyances - the absence of the dedicated app switcher key on the dock, which was conveniently present on the Samsung keyboard dock I tested earlier this month, and the absence of the familiar scrolling area on the touchpad that I got so used to on my laptop.

Mar

[Review] Wave Launcher Is Like Having WebOS On A Phone That You Actually Want

Posted by Brad Ganley in App Reviews, Applications, Apps/Games, News, Reviews

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

WebOS may catch a lot of flack because it never really took off but it does, in fact, have some really awesome features. One feature was the card view multitasking, which has already found its way onto Android. Another cool thing it did was that wacky swipe-up-from-the-bottom launcher gesture. Well, folks, guess what there's an app for now. It's called Wave Launcher - and it's great.

Wave Launcher's beauty is in its simplicity, just like its WebOS predecessor. You simply touch the bottom edge of your screen and swipe up. As you swipe up, so does a bar of five or more applications for you to select.