I asked the Surface Duo 2 SDK team if the spine feature is developer-accessible — These are my ideas why it should be
Just a few days ago, Microsoft presented their new iteration of the foldable Surface Duo device with amazing new and unique features.
After some hard crashes, Microsoft hopefully knows that nowadays a vivid app ecosystem is a huge part in becoming successful with such devices.
Shortly after the event, I asked in the official TechNet community if the so called “glance bar” or “spine” is open to developers or closed behind some system protection. You can find more information on the Surface Duo 2's product page.
Just a few hours later I got the answer that this feature is not app-accessible, yet. Nevertheless, Craig Dunn (Twitter)asked me how my app (idea) could facilitate this lighting up rows of LEDs. He will pass such ideas to the engineering team. Maybe we will see the opening of this awesome feature of the Surface Duo to the public.
My ideas
Development
- Dev builds let light up the glance bar in yellow
- Test builds in blue
- Live builds in “nothing”
Content creation
- Microphone input sound level visualization
- Show upload percentage (a full bar means video has been uploaded)
Health & well being
- Breath in & breath out scale to come down and relax
- Noise level detector visualization
- Rough Blood pressure metric with just a fast glance at the device
- Cycle tracking (1/2 filled glance bar equals date of Ovulation)
Messaging
- How important messages are. Spam just a little lighting, call from daughter’s school -> flashing, animation
- Categorizes of messages (red == work, blue == private)
How about you?
What are your ideas on how to embed the usage of the spine’s LEDs into your app? Let’s chat about it. Please write a comment or ping me on Twitter. My handle is: @tobonaut
