Show HN: Click counter using iPhone volume buttons | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Click counter using iPhone volume buttons

testflight.apple.com

16 pointsGoodluckH20 comments

Bear in mind this is a prerelease app on TestFlight and that Apple would not allow this behavior on the App Store, or even on apps notarized for alternative stores in the EU:

> 2.5.9 Apps that alter or disable the functions of standard switches, such as the Volume Up/Down and Ring/Silent switches, or other native user interface elements or behaviors will be rejected.

Infamously, there was a third party camera app, Camera+, that turned the Volume Up button into a shutter release. Apple pulled it from the store—and then released the same feature for the built in Camera app.

https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/112111/popular-ip...

That would suck for any kindle reader people. One of the best features is volume to switch pages.

oh damn i wasn't aware of this given that Apple's native camera app can use volume button to take pics

I really hate this rule. The Snapchat camera used to fire with the volume controls and now it is much harder to take a selfie. To add insult to injury, Apple’s own native camera app does this same thing! You can’t even argue that it’s a confusing experience if you, yourself, do it too.

There is a permitted API these days for physical capture buttons. Can't blame Apple if Snapchat doesn't adopt it.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avkit/avcaptureeve...

eReaders on iOS suck because they can't have this obvious feature. You can do some weird keymapping using accessibility options to get a remote keyboard to make page changes if you want.

KNOWN ISSUES SO FAR - counts more than one every time volume button is clicked (fixed in new build, waiting for review)

- crashes if you hold one of the volume buttons for long

JUST LEARNED THIS... Apparently, Apple prohibits apps from altering hardware functions like volume buttons. So, that likely means this app won't get published on App Store.

But it's been fun to learn Swift and Objective-C from building this simple app.

If I want this to be released, I would need to remove the volume button control and only support swipe gestures.

I can also make this open-source if you are interested in learning how it works.

Lemme know what you think.

Doesn't seem to work for me. I downloaded and ran on my Mac and proceeded to click the volume buttons on my iPhone but the count remains 0.

hahahahahaha

I'm on Android, but I assume it's a click counter like these physical devices? https://scorecount.com/click-counter/online-click-counter.jp...

Really nifty idea to use the volume buttons instead of the touchscreen.

I'd be interested in a frequency counter view, with a running average per minute or per second. So I can record that I see 10 Teslas per minute driving to work in the morning, but only 3 Teslas per minute on the way home at night (for example).

This is really cool for events instead of using old-style counters to keep track on numbers of people in the venue.

doesn't seem to work well for me. volume up and down sometimes register 1 count, sometimes 2, sometimes none. Deleted shortly after install, worried about what it's actually doing rather than counting.

thanks for trying it out!

this is a commonly reported bug that wasn't able to spot when in development mode.

i think the issue is that i might have attached the volume-button handler multiple times, so that each time you click on the volume button, those duplicated handlers all emit events.

pushed out a small fix currently under apple's review

Is this a social engineering test to see how many hacker news users will blindly download a testflight app? I assume it's been reviewed by the app store by this point, right?

it's a testflight app i built for fun but apparently it might not be able to pass the apple review for production release (i just learned this 2 seconds ago)

Fair enough, I didn't meant to imply you were nefarious, but I'm interested to see how many people will blindly download your app without considering whether they should.

yep that's the beauty of developing for the ios ecosystem. apple made it a high trust environment for users to try out different things by making it very safe and sandboxed

... in return of the freedom of every iOS user. Not a world I want to live in, same as a government telling me what to not eat so I am "safe".

To be fair, the whole point of iOS application sandboxing and the permissions system is to allow users to run unknown apps with a minimum of risk.

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