Google’s innovation and features may stir the whole industry, but we all know real progress starts once the developer community gets to work. We all love a good ROM, and we must say OmniROM is one of our very favorites. It runs great, was designed with the community in mind, and offers awesome features like the one we will talk about today.
Last March we reported on a developer who wanted to bring the “always listening” feature to OmniROM – Guillaume Lesniak. We have previously seen this in the Moto X and the Google Experience Launcher with the “OK Google” hotword. It may vary a bit from device to device, but ultimately the idea is that you can speak to your phone and perform various tasks.
Lesniak has finally taken care of the job and is getting ready to release said feature, but there is so much more to it than regular voice commands. The user can customize the hotword unlike we have ever seen before. You can change functions to different hotwords of your choice, and choose what each hotword will do, as you can see in the video below.
You can literally customize any shortcut or feature with a hotword! It seems to work very well and I would love to put this to the test.
This feature is not quite out yet, but it should be released soon. It might already be out by the time you read this, in which case you can simply head to OmniROM’s website for more details.
Furthermore, we are not sure if all supported devices will be compatible. Guillaume has stated in the past that not all processors can handle this. More specifically, he states that the Snapdragon 800 is, in fact, able to handle Moto X-like always listening capabilities.
We will have to wait a bit more until Guillaume Lesniak can give us all the details.
Two weeks ago, Apple and Google made peace in their long-running patent wars against each other. Apple and Samsung, on the other hand, are just starting…..again.
In the previous trial, Apple had accused Samsung of “systematically” copying features distinctive to its iOS software. Samsung denied that it had copied Apple patents and said it was Apple who was doing the copying. The jury found that Apple had infringed some Samsung patents and awarded $158,000 in damages to the South Korean firm. Apple had been seeking damages of $2.2bn after accusing Samsung of copying five patents.
Now, Apple is requesting a retrial and has also filed a permanent injunction to prevent Samsung using the patents it was found to have infringed.
Apple Insider is reporting that Apple, through court documents, is asserting that any continued sale of Samsung’s infringing product could cause Apple “irreparable harm that cannot be remedied with monetary damages.”
Two years ago, a separate jury ordered Samsung to pay Apple $930m after finding it had used Apple technology. That verdict is still being challenged by Samsung.
Peek was originally known as a feature built into the ParanoidAndroid ROM which is a custom AOSP ROM that is based on CyanogenMod. At first, Peek was meant to be strictly a feature for the ROM. However, as we’ve seen with a lot of ROM-specific apps as of late, Peek made its way to the Google Play Store for anyone to download.
Okay so here’s how Peek works. When you get a notification, the application will poll your sensors for about 10 seconds. When an app polls your sensors it simply means that the application is keeping an eye on your phone to see if it gets moved or if anything happens that could trigger a sensor. If the app determines that your sensors are in use, Peek will turn on your screen so you can look at your notifications.
It sounds kind of complicated but I assure you it isn’t. If your screen is off, you get a notification, and if you check your phone within 10 seconds of the notification coming in, your phone will turn the screen on automatically and show you the notification. If you have multiple notifications, it’ll show you multiple icons. One for each app that you have a notification in. So if you have a Gmail, Hangouts, and Google Play Store notification, it’ll show you those three icons.
When the screen turns on you’ll see your background blurred so you can see each notification icon. You can tap each one and then long press the larger icon to see the content of that message. So if you have a Hangouts message and you long press the Hangouts icon, you can see what the message says. If you want to unlock your phone, you swipe the icon to the left. If you want to dismiss the notification, you swipe to the right. If you want to deal with that notification right then and there, you simply click on the icon and the appropriate app will open. So no matter what you want to do, you can do it.
The settings menu is pretty straight forward. You can change the polling time to match your needs so if you need more or less time to check your phone, you can choose to do that. It also comes with three polling settings. You can have it on battery saver mode which uses the previously mentioned polling time (default 10 seconds) so your battery doesn’t drain.
You can set it to active while charging which will poll your phone constantly while you’re on a charger but then use the timed battery saver mode when unplugged. Finally, there is always active which polls your phone constantly. Beware though, this can drain your battery quite a bit. Unfortunately, the battery drain while always on is unavoidable because the Moto X had a special processor built in to handle this task while your device will require the use of its much more powerful processor cores to perform the same task.
That’s really it folks. It sounds like a simple little application but once you get it set to your habits, you can literally cut the time you spend dealing with notifications in half. It’s also worth mentioning that there are new features being talked about, such as a new setting that will allow you to have your phone screen simply turn on whenever you get a notification instead of using a system that polls the sensors. So if it’s just not hitting that chord right now, check back frequently because the development team is adding new features.
