Show HN: iOS Motion Library – detect a backtap, knock and wave in your app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: iOS Motion Library – detect a backtap, knock and wave in your app

kiwimotion.io

31 pointskiwiwearables12 comments

Try out an alpha version of our new iOS motion library.

I was really excited to try this out, but then I hit the requirement to provide contact information just to download the library. This is, for good or bad, always off putting to me. I don't consider the need to collect certain information bad in itself as long as it's reasonable or at least justified. In this case however, there's a distinct lack of communication as to why the information is being collected and that makes me wary (it's also fairly common recently so this isn't the only offender). I can make all sorts of my own assumptions as to why the developers would need that information, but after being bitten a few times by folks who have been a little less than transparent with their actual use of that information I'd prefer not to rely on my own assumptions.

Some feedback based on my experience (take with a healthy dose of salt):

- The quickstart menu item is the only one that takes you away from the main page which interrupts the experience when using this particular style of pagination. The way back to the main page from the quickstart page is also not particularly obvious (just a back arrow within the logo would be sufficient).

- A big red flag is the counter counting how many gestures have been "tracked" leading me to believe that there's some sort of phone home going on which, all things being equal, doesn't make too much sense for a gesture library (unless some explanation is provided).

- Another big red flag is no mention of why the need for a full name is required in addition to the email, or why the email is necessary for the download (It's mentioned that it will be sent to the email if the user scrolls down to the 2nd form, but not in the first "page").

- No obvious way to provide feedback is immediately available (I assume it's provided in whatever email communication is made or within the library itself).

(edit formatting)

Yeah... what I thought:

Intercepting the traffic coming out of the app shows me its making api requests to http://api.parse.com — so, basically, I would imagine it's sending some kind of usage data (can't yet decipher the headers as I don't have time) back to Parse.com, which is allowing it to 'phone home'.

Also... this is happening with every motion gesture attempt.

sigh

the tap counting is a way to capture anonymous data around the tap, wave and knock to help determine discrepancies between different forms. Thanks for note about the email at the top. Both the pod and sample app are available on our github.com/kiwiwearbles page :) Full name is required for the draw.

Applaud the efforts. Motion/gesture libraries in general are notoriously tricky to get right.

I am a little bit confused at the three gestures you chose in terms of 'launching' with. Recording custom motions and a good path to implement those could be incredibly useful, but I'm a little bit hesitant at the real world use of the 'knock' and 'backtap'.

Either way, signed up. Keen.

The use of backgrounds in that website make it a little bit hard to read stuff, by the way :)

What are the plans long-term for this?

My current favourite use of gesture control is the Peek option for the glance screen in WP8 [1]. I find it sits in a nice spot where it allows crude interaction with the device when you dont want to commit to fully interacting with it. Similarly with the xbox one gesture controls - I use them as a last resort when I dont want to commit to making full use of the device; such as when I am sitting on the sofa and want to change it to watching TV and all other controls are out of range.

Also, sorry for being off-topic, but as someone from New Zealand I find the name to be slightly confusing. Is there any connection to NZ, the fruit or the bird? I'm not complaining, just sounds odd to me.

[1] http://www.wpcentral.com/nokia-brings-new-hover-feature-lumi...

The library looks great - congrats on that!

Just one small gripe: the name. Kiwi (https://github.com/kiwi-bdd/Kiwi) is a (pretty popular!) BDD testing framework for iOS. Maybe consider renaming, as two Kiwi libraries in one project is confusing :)

The lib is 17.7MB, that's pretty big for tap detections

Direct link to download: http://www.kiwimotion.io/library/kiwi-motion-app-master.zip

I'm pretty sure it's so big because it includes the Parse framework (31MB framework, uncompressed)

thanks for your note. Gestures are indeed tricky and hence the alpha version. We initially started as a custom gesture library, but realized that even basic back tap type gestures could be useful to augment existing apps.

thanks for your feedback on the site. Ali

What other languages are you interested in using?, we will likely publish a node version next if there is interest

Just signed up for it and I'm going to give it a try as soon as I can. Has anyone had any (good or bad) experience with it?

> 328 taps have been captured and 352 developers have joined

Is library phoning home?

Yeah... see my comment to @yojimbo...

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