This is a workaround for the near-total lack of buttons on modern phones.<p>If phone makers would bring back physical buttons and let users do stuff with them, pressy wouldn't exist. Of course, the trick with putting buttons around a phone is that you have to be careful about which ones you use - I accidentally hit buttons on my Samsung Focus near-constantly because they decided it would be good to include a "camera" button that instantly drops what your doing and jumps you over to the camera app. And a similar "search" face-button.<p>But really, a pair of unbound L/R shoulder buttons that apps could interpret however they liked (or ignore if it's a portrait-mode app) with no usage on the home-screen? Who wouldn't want that? Would be fantastic for gaming, for camera/AR apps, things like that.<p>But no, because suddenly everybody think they're Steve Jobs and the phones must have perfectly clean lines, we're left with nothing but hypersensitive capacitive face-buttons and if you want something that actually <i>clicks</i> you have to buy a Nintendo DS.
This seems like a really neat idea.. One of the things that I loved about my Droid X and still miss terribly is a physical camera button - it's just so much easier to take my duckface selfies using a physical button!<p>I like the idea that this is so configurable also - I can think of many applications for something like this..<p>It's interesting that they have a hardware component, though this really seems to be a kickstarter for a button dedicated 'smart actions' application (in that it works without the button using mute button clicks on headsets) - not that this decreases my interest in it in the least.<p>Excited to see where this goes...
It doesn't have to be just for Android. There's already interest in it from developers for jailbroken iOS: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/1lbyrr/pressy_a_button_for_your_headphone_jack_meant_for/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/1lbyrr/pressy_a_b...</a><p>And the FAQ on the Kickstarter page indicates that they'd probably welcome that:<p>> We are not releasing an iOS app for Pressy. There are too many restrictions on the API. We hope our developers community builds an app compatible with iOS.
I figured this could be done by overriding any existing hardware button callbacks, but apparently you can not outside of your app (see this SO question: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2986337/is-it-possible-to-create-an-android-service-that-listens-for-hardware-key-presse" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2986337/is-it-possible-to...</a>).
So what happens when Pressy is pushed when it's inside my pocket? Make a photo? Call mom? Flashlight? The latter may be dangerous even, with the heat that it can produce.<p>Not quite unthinkable since the button is sticking out if the phone.
custom actions like this for your hardware buttons should work with the existing buttons without the need for the hack. holding power on with some custom roms can be configured to have the flashlight on while it's held.<p>would be nice if an api for these buttons existed in the android sdk. anyone know if it's there?