I'd like an easy interface to events around the phone being at rest (no accelerometer input).<p>For the rest state: I assume that most people have their phone by their beds at night. I have a locale rule that puts my phone into airplane mode during the hours I'm normally asleep. This is much more easily/accurately expressed as "phone at rest for 15m". Similarly, I'd like to sync news when I pick up the phone to leave in the morning (I don't always unlock the phone when I do) so it can sync over wifi.<p>I'd also like to monitor signal strength. I do so in Locale and shut down the 3g data connection if the signal strength is under 25%. This combined with the airplane mode at night and an undervolted kernel gets my (old, otherwise stock) Droid Incredible up to 3 days of battery life through normal use.
They likely did this on Android because it's the easiest platform to developer such a product. On iOS and WP, background apps are severely limited so it makes sense why Android is only platform that gets this.
I thought that stuff was well covered already, with the leader being Locale (iirc).<p>Did anyone try a couple of these and can provide a comparison? The article is light on details, the biggest difference that I noticed is the configuration via a website. Well, and the Facebook login downer.
This is really cool. Just set up a message to my wife when I leave work. "I'm heading home from work. Based on traffic data, it should take me XX minutes to travel XX miles". Took about 10 minutes to write thanks to some good examples in the documentation.<p>Looking forward to watching this evolve. Should be extremely powerful with the right set of triggers and hardware integration.
There is an already existing program that allows you to do pretty much the same thing, I have had it forever.<p>The app is called Tasker (<a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch....</a>) works like a charm and can be programmed right on the phone.
This article is bizarre. Why is written in such a strange way? "your favorite Redmond techno-giant is sitting on a horse" What the fuck does that mean?
In some cases this might backfire horribly. Imagine some guy sets his phone up to send an SMS to his spouse when he is held up at work. Imagine he also lets the phone send his location, because he travels a lot at work. Result: "X will be late today, he is currently at [coordinates of his secretary's house]". Don't get me wrong, this feature is awesome but when combined with naivity the device can do things that are equally naive.
I'll be 100% behind this project when it has as much control over a device as Tasker does. Recipes in JavaScript and not having to "program" on the device itself are exactly the kinds of things I wish Tasker could do. The modeOfTransport monitor is pretty attractive too.<p>Beyond all that, I'm curious about on{X}'s battery usage. That's a huge selling point for always-on processes like this.
This looks really interesting. And yes, there's other options on Android to do it, but Microsoft looks like they've taken a different focus on it.<p>I do wonder at the 'less strict security model' part though. I'd think more 'less strict process model' would be a bit more accurate as it's a processing issue, not so much security issue.
I've yet to sign up to the service (until an alternative means of authentication is available), so I'm not sure if it's an obvious question but I'm curious about the metadata required to render a script as a recipe. Is this inferred from the script itself or is it manually input at some stage in the script's creation? I'm referring to this type of thing, where the bracketed words are treated as parameters:<p><pre><code> "Launch the [music] app when I am [walking]"
</code></pre>
Also, are these parameters bound to the script at runtime or is a new script generated for each variant?
Llama does some of this sort of thing already. <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kebab.Llama&hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kebab.Llam...</a>
This looks very promising. Like others have noted, even on the Play Store they are getting battered with negative reviews because of Facebook only authentication.<p>+1 for another authentication type.