teh fear

I’m a big fan of SkylarEC’s PocketTouch application for the iPhone/iPod touch, it allows me to change volume / skip to a different track without taking the device out of my pocket.

I was quite happy with firmware 1.1.4 on my ipod touch, I had my email accounts set up and even work calendar and contacts through the outlook sync client. Unfortunately, somewhere over the last month outlook sync client stopped working for me, I tried in vain to get it working again but no joy!

Firmware 2.0 came along, with the promise of Exchange push mail, so not only work calendar and contacts, but mail too. The only downside? the loss of all my jailbroken applications (except for the wonderful ’sketches’ which I see is available on the AppStore).
I can live without most of them, but the loss of PocketTouch almost prevented me from upgrading, but the pull of push mail was too much.

The week between upgrading and the iphone-dev team pwnage tool was a long one but now I my device is jailbroken again, although still no PocketTouch, Skylar will get round to releasing a version for firmware2.0 at some point in the future but he’s currently working on other things.

Well, I couldn’t wait, so I set about re-creating as much of the app as I needed for my own purposes, it’s not as feature rich as the real version, but it does what I need and maybe some others out there might like to use it while they wait for the real version too.

What you can do with my version:
skip to next/previous track with swipe left and right
increase / decrease volume with swipe up and down
Double tap to play / pause (I preferred double-tap, less chance of doing it by mistake)
Screen dims when app starts and restores* when finished.
Track info displayed on screen.

What you cannot do:
everything else that Skylar’s app does – no configuration, volume is always vertical (only runs as an upright portrait app), skip is always horizontal, dim always happens*, Volume hud always displayed on volume change, no shake shuffle, no vibrate (I’ve only got an ipod touch, they don’t have vibrate!) and no anything else that I haven’t mentioned.
Also, my app has a silly debug info panel at the bottom of the screen – still, you can’t see it when your device is in your pocket!

*don’t lock/ put device to sleep with the app running, the screen will get stuck on dim – a reboot / respring should clear this.
[update] actually it looks like closing my app, locking the device then unlocking it again is enough to get the screen lit properly again.

Want it? I can let you have a zip file – if you can figure out how to install it on your own device then go ahead…

UPDATE
I’ve been having a little fun playing with this application and I have added the following:

• track position counter (mins:secs through track)
• inactive region around the edge of the screen – if your touch does not start within a 150 pixel radius circle from the center of the screen then the app will ignore you. Useful for pulling the device out of your pocket without accidentally firing an action.
• If you start a drag for prev/next track but take too long, the track will start to seek forward/back instead, with speed of skip dependant on distance from start position (horizontally)
• on-screen graphics detailing the active touch circle and swipe zones – see screen shot below, I’ve touched (at the centre of the small circle), a finger has to travel outside the small circle before it will decide if you’ve gone horizontally or vertically and then only when you are within the angles depicted by the blue zones.
  
  

new version frist 1.01 here