Hacker News Reader

Comment by firloop | Hacker News Reader

Cool idea, but if I owned a Pebble and wanted to do this, I'd probably just create a Tasker profile to accomplish the same thing rather than install another app.

View on HN

I've tried various Tasker solutions for this, but it doesn't work well for phones that are encrypted and secured with a password.

The closest thing I could find was a Tasker add-on that was given root permissions and disabled the password, unlocked, and re-enabled the password. At least, that's where my research led me, I could never get that to work.

To reinvent Gestice, set up a profile that is activated by the combination of "Bluetooth Connected" and "Shake Gesture", and runs the "Secure Settings: Pattern Lock Disabled" task to wake the phone up with no lock screen. Optionally, add an exit task that restores your lock screen.

The Secure Settings is being transitioned to something they called System+ right now, so YMMV.

With Gestice we tried to make it more secure by syncing the gesture on the pebble with the phone; I'm not sure that other apps provide this syncing functionality.

As well, Gestice keeps your screen locked with a PIN in addition to the synced-gesture unlock. This wasn't an easy engineering task -- it took a lot of persistence with with the Android APIs. (The only string attached is that Gestice has to be given a PIN for your lock screen, which it manages for you.)

i think it compares the shake profile from pebble to that of a phone and only unlocks if they match.

I'm shane from the gestice team page. You're absolutely right -- the gestures on the phone and the pebble have to be in sync to register and open your apps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com