Share your digital activities on Android - AppTicker

If you share an apartment with a friend you know what they do. There is no need to communicate “I am watching TV” or “I am cooking” as this is pretty obvious. In the digital space this is much more difficulty. Sharing what we engage with and peripherally perceive what others do is not yet trivial.

Niels Henze and Alireza Sahami in our group have made a new attempt to research how to bridge this gap. With the AppTicker for Android they have released a software, that offers means to share usage of applications on your phone with your friends on Facebook. You can choose that whenever you start a certain app (e.g. the web browser, the camera, or the public transport app) this is shared in your activities on Facebook. In the middle screen you can see the means for control.

The app provides additionally a personal log (left screen) of all the apps that were used. I found that feature quite interesting and when looking at it I really started to reflect on my app usage patterns. If you are curious, have an android phone and if you use Facebook, please have a go and try it out.

The App homepage on our server: http://projects.hcilab.org/appticker/
Get it directly from Google Play or search for AppTicker in Google Play.

To access it directly you can scan the following QR-Code:

What alarm clock are you using?

The answer is probably "my phone" - it seems that for many people the phone has become their primary alarm clock. We have discussed this before in a blog post…

Some years back I took part in a design competition at the appliance design conference and suggested an alarm clock that links you to your friends [1]. One of the ideas was to have dynamic wake up times based on when you friends got up. The paper was accepted in March 2005 - this was before twitter was founded and before facebook was open for general registration. At this time we envisioned this as a stand-alone appliance as micro-blogging was not yet around.

Time has move on and many appliance ideas have since become apps on the phone. In the course of his research Ali is working on ideas for increasing the connectedness between people. One of the case studies is now an alarm clock - called weSleep - that has the basic alarm clock function and has additionally means to log sleep hours and perceived sleep quality. It also allows to post information related to the going to sleep or being woken up to social networking software such as facebook.

Interesting in trying it out? Check out the web page of weSleep and if you are interested in taking part in a study please contact Ali (not sure if he still is interested in more volunteers).

[1] Schmidt, A. 2006. Network alarm clock (The 3AD International Design Competition). Personal Ubiquitous Comput. 10, 2-3 (Jan. 2006), 191-192. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00779-005-0022-y