Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe with pocketnow.com in the past we've shown you all kinds of cool shortcuts on how to get to your information faster or how to get your android to do stuff just by talking to it well today it's kind of a little bit different we've shown you something called google gesture search in the past which is essentially google search using gestures by writing on the screen well there are a whole bunch more players in the field now so let's go take a look okay so first up is our old standby and that is Google gesture search it's free in the market you can go ahead and download it and install it and essentially you get this very poem looking search bar if you will that blacks out the whole screen it has a little text area down at the bottom you actually write what you're searching for up in this top part and your gestures will be minimized and written down here in this lower part so if I want to call Citibank I write a see it blanks out now I've got my C down here and everybody with the C shows up and I I'm getting closer Attie why oh wait it's not City it's City but still City Bank is showing up so that's really kind of cool if I want to then dial them I can so kind of easy there but it's a little bit difficult to get to because you've got to have that shortcut sitting on your home screen to be able to get into gesture search mode well to accommodate that here's an app called gesture bar which doesn't have any relation to to Google gesture search what it does rather is it adds I'll show you go ahead and show that it adds a gesture search icon up in your notification bar you can set that when you boot up or even set that as the default when you long press on the search button which would then override the voice search functionality that comes stocked with that long pressing on the search button but let's see what that does so we're going to go back home and here we go we've got it up in the bar we're going to pull this down and tap and we can launch gesture search right there and we're right back into the Google gesture search app so not all that convenient rather than having a button to tap right there on your home screen now you have to pull down your notification shade and then tap on that item in the other notification bar so a few steps to get there however it does make it convenient because your notification bar is almost always present it's almost always there similarly if you're on your home screen your your little tray buttons down here are usually always there as well you know I could come over here to another home screen and now it's not there so I have to find a home screen that I had that on or open up my app drawer to get to it the other way now if I'm already in an app and not on the home screen that's where that comes in kind of handy so interesting way that we can do that if we want to to go ahead and close that we launch the app again and we simply hide and then it is gone from the top bar well next we've got an idea of calling someone just by writing a gesture and that's where this app called gesture call comes into play you tap on the app this is of course free as are everything that I've shown you so far it is paid by ads that run down at the bottom you're familiar with that with a lot of free apps here we can add a gesture we can see our existing gestures and we can go into options in this case confirming that you've got the right place before you make that call which is really a good idea just in case you've got a couple gestures that are similar or it didn't quite understand who you're trying to call you've got a chance to back out before that person is is called so from here let's go ahead and take a look I've got Citibank in here again so let's write a C for Citibank it recognizes that and says hey do you really want to call Citibank yes and I can toggle a checkbox right they did not show that message again which I believe is not gesture based I believe that's for the entire app we can go ahead and tap yes and make that call now it's kind of interesting let's go into gestures here really quick here is Citibank we've got to a long press on an item we'll go ahead and edit that gesture I wanted that gesture to be a dollar sign okay so let's go ahead and create that and now let's go back and write our dollar sign it doesn't really matter how I do my dollar sign it never recognizes it so it looks like you've got to do very simple single stroke gestures in the gesture call app to be able to to get that to work the way that you want it to but when when it does if you're doing just single stroke characters or gestures it works really well now but app the started this whole thing off is called sign and one of our pocket now readers James stock it actually contacted me about this and said hey you've got to give this a try so we are and that led to to some of the others this is probably one of the more well thought-out gesture apps it's not like just your search where it searches everything it's not like just your call where all you can do is call rather sign light lets you send a text or call a phone number based on a gesture as you notice here you've got a top bar which has a back button configuration button or Settings button and that ad person or add gesture button you'll also notice that it goes away very very quickly so let's go back into that down at the bottom you've got a call icon and a text icon right down there you'll also notice in the background this is a beautiful weather live wallpaper and yes it is raining outside just a little aside there but while I was doing that it went away again first thing that I really like about this app it's not there all the time it's only there when you want it and it's very elegant in the way that it goes away one thing I don't particularly like about it is these are semi-transparent and they're so transparent that the buttons on the bottom kind of disappear I'd like a little bit more opacity a little bit less translucency on those so that you could see them a little bit better let's go ahead and take a look in this middle area that went away that middle area is where you write your gesture so you've actually got a transparent gesture surface you can write in so let's go ahead and do our Citibank symbol and right there it does something now I'm going to go ahead and cancel that so it doesn't call but let's go back and see what it did first of all it took that more complex gesture which is very nice you can do multi stroke it didn't take multiple times to to recognize the gesture it just went ahead and did it the second thing is I configured it so that it had a vibrate on recognizer so as soon as it recognized it it vibrated the phone let me know hey I've got this and at that point it came up with the dialogue that said okay hey this is who I think it is do you want to go ahead and call and let's go ahead and do that again so we come back in here the whole Citibank and we have a configurable timer a countdown timer and we'll see yeah I did it went ahead and called but we've got this configurable countdown timer then that basically gives us an opportunity to not dial the number just like the other app did but it also gives us a timeout so we don't have to interact with it to make it go ahead and make the call now that's something that you can change in the settings so let's go back in here to settings and default vaio mode you can set that's either call or text vibration that's what we talked about vibrate after dial gesture for confirmation or success log we want to not keep a call log after outgoing calls the call confirmation duration we can set that up as high as four seconds I'd really like to see that go up more and then down as low as no seconds so let's go ahead and put that up at four and then the gesture threshold which is how strict you want the match to your your gesture to be now this is the light version of the app light version is free the premium version costs about two bucks so really not that bad the light version is really there for you to give it a try and see if you like it if you do then you can go ahead and buy it but let's go ahead and go in here to our contacts and let's say I want to contact Allstate insurance at work and I'll do the letter A and it doesn't save because the light version only allows me to save three contacts or three signs at one time if I want to add more signs I have to download the full version which really isn't a problem you know it's a kind of a limited version of the app lets you try it and see if you are are happy with it and if you are then you go ahead and buy the full version so let's go ahead and look at a couple other things now that we've talked about things that I like in here we can see all of my settings or all of my contacts rather we can view all that I have assigned so I've just got these three and that's why it won't let me add any more but you'll notice I can't add a contact from here that's one thing that I'd like if I don't have someone already in my gesture list I would really like a button that says hey go ahead and add a person and then have that take me over to my default contact manager it doesn't do that I'd kind of like it second thing and this I really like you'll notice I have two buttons out here and you might be saying hey Joe why why do you have two buttons there one is actually a widget so this is a shortcut that I pulled in from my app drawer and just dropped it on the screen this is a widget and I did that by long pressing on the home screen and choosing the widgets and then picking that out of the list they do the same thing but I really don't need to know what this is I don't have to have the word underneath it because the button is so very very distinct and and really kind of elegant so I can then just tap on the widget it has a little bit of an animation to show me that it's kind of off hook so let's go back and show that to you again see if you can see it that's something that the regular shortcut icon doesn't have so kind of nice a little bit cleaner takes up less space on the screen but that gets us back to the same issue that we had before you do have to have it on the screen so if I don't have it on here I'd have to have a shortcut icon down here and of course this is only shortcuts and not widgets but again these guys don't have text under them so that's kind of okay but I can't access it from anywhere else meaning like the gesture bar I could pull down my notification bar from any app and be able to get right to that - the gesture search the Google desk or search but with sign I can't do that it's something that I'd like to see them to do but honestly I don't know how they do that other than putting something up in the notification bar which really that's getting kind of cluttered already and I only have one email you know normally I'll have a Twitter maybe even a Facebook alert a calendar alert up there I've got a lot of stuff you know downloads I've got a raw manager update so this space is getting very very crowded even just now with only one icon up there so I don't know if necessarily putting it up there in the notification bar is the best way to do it possibly like what CyanogenMod has done coming across here and putting it in that tray or that nightshade but up here at the top so that it's not in to go away it's not in the bar but it is in the shade now HTC Sense does some stuff like that as well so it'd be kind of nice if we occupied that space with common or frequently used stuff that we want to have access to easily but not distract us from everything up there so kind of interesting searching and dialing and doing stuff with your fingers the one other thing and James shared this with me and I I agree I can only call or text using this app unlike gesture search I can't launch an app I can't search for other stuff on my phone I don't know if I really should because this is very basic very simple it's a clean and elegant concept but I'd still like to have that functionality maybe buried somewhere deep in a configuration screen to turn that on or off or somehow done elegantly so I can launch an app easily using that using the gesture search so I don't have to go hunting for it in my big long list of stuff that's in my app drawer so kind interesting I'd like to think James first sending in the recommendation one thing he didn't want me to mention is that he has been in contact with the developer the developer is very very quick in responding and just a regular normal ordinary person at least that was my impression not some huge company that you've got to get a helpdesk ticket number before they'll answer you back so very nice there I do want to thank James for sending in that recommendation if you've got an app that you think is novel or unique that we haven't seen before or maybe something that we've seen before but has been vastly improved and you want to share it with the rest of the pocketnow.com viewers make sure you send that in to us you can click on our contact information on any one of our articles just the byline right there underneath the title and send us off an email that will get to us immediately and we'll be able to respond to it as fast as we can of course if you see breaking news happening or have some kind of a tip that you'd like to send in to us you can also click on the tip s button over there at pocketnow.com as well of course since this is a video we want to make sure if you liked it give the video a big thumbs up if you don't like it let us know in the comments what you'd like to see done differently and if you have some suggestions on apps that we missed or didn't cover well enough or if there's features of these apps that we didn't cover that you think we should have leave those in the comments as well of course you'll want to subscribe to our video channel if you haven't done so already it's free and it's probably the best way to keep up to date on what's going on with all kinds of smart phones stuff in a video format and of course if you want text you can head over to pocketnow.com subscribe to our RSS feed and then you'll be able to stay up to date and your friends will be envious of the breadth and depth of your knowledge so showing off all the cool stuff you can do with gestures on Android for pocketnow.com I'm Joe Levi