[omniusovermind]

While I wait to decide whether or not to move to a BB10, I did some tinkering with a couple of apps to enable gesture swiping on Android, even within apps running in the foreground. The video quality is bad, I didn't use good lighting and recorded it using my PlayBook but it gives the general idea.

The beginning of the video shows me using a downswipe from anywhere on my home screen to swipe down the notification bar, where I click a brightness setting toggle on a toggle bar I have in there. Then I click an icon that opens one of my app folders to start an app. While in that app I demonstrate swipes from either side of the screen that have the following functions - two sets of favorite apps, recently used apps (multitasking from inside any app). The app is called SwipePad, and you can cusromize the swipes to do anything; bring up the phone, contacts, recent contacts, apps, bookmarks, settings menus and pretty much anything you want.

Later in the video, I show how I use a "peek" swipe to show a recent SMS in my notification bar. Then I do a full swipe to enter SMS and read it.

Something to bear in mind, this is all done on an archaic 2 year old android version 2.3.4. My phone is customized to mimic 4.x in a lot of ways but the current version of android has a sh*t ton more options for multitasking and a way better notification field among other improvements. The kicker is that this effort required a third party launcher and setting up a few different apps. It's very customizable, but at the same time a lot of it isn't built in, which pretty much comes down to individual preference.