AikonLab, Samir Oueldi’s new venture, has been quite silent recently. We all loved the innovation that Samir brought in the S60 field with his mastering of the accelerometer and sensors technologies on RotateMe, NokMote amongst others, but ever since he launched AikonLab, updates have been a bit on the slow side. Not anymore, as Samir has been busy bringing new versions of all his projects.
Handwave beta 2
Handwave is an amazing application where you wipe your hand in front of the front-facing camera of your device either right or left. The movement is detected by the camera and will scroll right or left, accordingly. When the first beta was launched, Ricky made a video to demonstrate the usefulness of Handwave for changing music tracks while driving. Now Handwave has reached the 2nd beta stage, adding support to all S60 devices (3rd edition pre-FP, FP1, FP2, 5th edition), and improving the handwave detection. Some other settings have been added too, like the ability to remove the viewfinder and to zoom. Landscape mode is now supported, though with bugs, and the application has a newer icon.
nAlertMe beta 4
nAlertMe is a anti-theft application that will launch an alarm sound when your device is picked from a steady position by someone who is not entitled to. In order to avoid the alarm when you pick the device, you have to do a series of flips with your handset. This allows nAlertMe to differentiate between the owner of the phone who knows the gestures, and a thief/curious person who wants to mess with it. Beta 4 introduces support to all S60 3rd edition devices, including S60 5th edition and adds 2 new alarm sounds. If you’re a bit paranoid about your handset, this application should definitely help you out.
Frozen Bubble Twisted Beta 2
This game developed by Samir, is an accelerometer-enabled version of the popular Frozen Bubble game. Beta 2 adds support to all accelerometer-enable S60 devices, as well as some support to the touchscreen on S60 5th edition (check the official game page to see more details, Samir explains it better). It also fixes some bugs and improves the backlight changing effect according to the number of bubbles popped. Frozen Bubble Twisted adds a lot of “twists” here and there to the gameplay and is definitely on the cool side of games on S60.
xDancer
xDancer is a new application introduced by Samir that he admits to have made in a few minutes following a request. apparently, you just have to shake your phone to play some music. The magic is in copying an xDancer.mp3 file to your C:/Data directory. xDancer works on all S60 devices with an accelerometer, including S60 5th Edition. It’s also an Open Source application, so if you’re beginning to explore developing for S60 and you want to see how to use the sensor technology properly, then you could take a peak at the code and learn from the best.
What do you think of these updates? Are you a fan of the possibilities that the accelerometer and the new sensors technology brings to our handsets? Or do you still feel that it’s more of a science-fiction-like technology reserved for addicted geeks who are willing to walk in public waving at their phone and shaking it like it’s going to drop candies?
