SENARYNotes · Senary Launcher 1.5
Twist twice
Five ways to open the voice card without touching the screen, and the four that did not survive being measured.
Version 1.5 of Senary Launcher added voice: hold the search bar in the dock, say an app's name, let go, and the app opens. Holding needs a hand on the screen, so I wanted a second way in that does not. It took five attempts. Each was built, then measured on a Pixel 10a from labelled sensor logs: the gesture done on purpose, a run of ordinary handling, and a note of which was which.
| Gesture | Result |
|---|---|
| Raise to the ear | Never fired |
| Raise to the mouth | 3 of 4, about 0.8 seconds to arm |
| Hold volume down and lift | Worked; removed |
| A single flick upright | Also fired on 10 of 11 ordinary pick-ups |
| Twist twice | 10 of 10 twists, none of the ordinary handling |
Raise to the ear
The first idea was the obvious one: lift the phone as if taking a call, and let the proximity sensor at the top of the screen confirm it. It never fired. Holding a phone to speak into it puts the bottom of the phone at your mouth, and the sensor at the top is never covered.
Raise to the mouth
So, no proximity sensor: just the tilt. A phone brought up to the mouth ends close to upright, and firing once it passed 88 degrees caught 3 raises of 4. But it took about 0.8 seconds to be sure, which is a long time to hold a phone at your face waiting for it to notice.
Volume down
Hold volume down and lift. It worked, and it went. The volume keys are for the volume, and a second meaning on them is the kind of thing people find by accident.
A single flick
A sharp flick to upright is quick, and it fired. So did 10 of 11 ordinary pick-ups, and the pick-ups were faster than the flicks. When the movement you are trying to ignore is the stronger of the two, no threshold separates them.
Twist twice
Motorola has shipped gestures like this for years: twist the phone twice to open the camera, chop it twice for the torch. A twist is a turn about the phone's long axis, back and forth, and the point of doing it twice is that ordinary handling does not alternate like that.
The rule Senary uses is four alternating swings about the long axis, each peaking at 4 radians a second or more, all starting within 0.8 seconds. In the logs that caught 10 twists of 10 and none of the ordinary handling. The longest alternating run that handling produced was three swings: one short, but a whole back-and-forth that picking a phone up does not do.
What shipped
It is off until you choose it, in Settings, Gestures, and it works on the home screen. A twist can open the voice card, or toggle the torch instead, which is Motorola's other gesture arrived at from the other side. After a twist the microphone stays on until you stop talking, eight seconds at most, with Android's microphone indicator showing; the privacy policy has the detail.
Still open
Two of the first four twist sessions misheard “Maps”, where holding the search bar never did. I do not know why yet. Speaking without a finger on the screen may change how far the phone is from your mouth, or how you speak; it is being watched rather than guessed at.
More notes: all of them. What changed in each version: What's new.