that’s whacked

Gesture Lock

Saturday, Nov 13. 2010  –  Category: Musings  –  12 Comments

(Just want a link to the app in the market? Scan the QR code to the right or click here)

While I was on vacation last week eating my way through Taiwan I kept whipping out my phone to take photos.  Trouble is, I’d keep unlocking my phone, swiping my home screens or switching to the apps launcher to launch one of the many camera apps I have installed (RetroCamera, FX Camera, or the built in Camera).  Or I’d grab my phone to check into Foursquare, or tweet, or write notes… or pretty much anything.  The one thing in common with all these tasks?

I knew exactly what I wanted to do everytime I took my phone out.

Yet each time I was unlocking, and then swiping around to find the app and then launching it.  In the case of a camera app that means losing precious seconds of the moment I’m trying to capture.  Soooo it occurred to to see if I could find a lock screen that would enable me to just use gestures to unlock and automatically launch apps.  The closest I found was some lock screen that came on some old Samsung devices (though seemingly not on the Galaxy S I had).. and even that was limited to hard-coded “letter” gestures.

What to do, what to do?  I’m an Android nut/nerd, so figured I’d write my own… and after a couple days of hacking, I finished it up today.  So without further ado, I present Gesture Lock, now available in the Android Market for 99 cents.  I might make a limited free version available later, but was too lazy to do it now.  Here’s a couple of screenshots:

This is the main launcher app.  This is where you can define custom gestures for unlocking the screen, and mapping to any available app you have installed.  It also has a preferences screen for a few basic prefs: enabling/disabling Gesture Lock (of course), toggling the clock between 24/12 hour clock, and enabling/disabling the notification bar.  I leave mine enabled so I can see things like email, text messages, tweets, battery status, etc. – but the caveat of this is that the notification bar is then draggable.  Convenient, but less secure.  Disabling it is more secure, but less convenient.  Trade-off.  Meh.

This is what the lock screen looks like with a sample gesture drawn.  Super convenient, unlock, and launch your app without delay.

If you install the app and find any issues or have some comments/suggestions, I’d appreciate any feedback here…