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I am working on gesture recognition on iOS devices. The official documentation at http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/EventHandling/Conceptual/EventHandlingiPhoneOS/MultitouchEvents/MultitouchEvents.html is useful to understand how gesture recognition works and can be incorporated inside an app. My question is how can gestures be recognized anywhere, e.g. the home screen, or in any other app, by an app running in the background. I am open to solutions referring to private API's. Is the GraphicsServices framework relevant in this case ? As an example, the display recorder app in the cydia store is able to do it.

Another approach possible is by use of gesture recognition devices like kinect for windows or Leap for Mac.

Please post your suggestions. Thanks.

Rob
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Hrishikesh_Pardeshi
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1 Answers1

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I guess you are asking for a way to have "global gestures" which I think you can achieve by attaching the Gesture Recognizers to the Window or your main ViewController, this can be useful to achieve thing like when the user swaps from the left edge to right and you want to display a hidden menu (just like in the facebook application)

Without jailbreak I think connecting the iPhone/iPad to another gesture device such as the Kinect or Leap you would need to write a lot of code, first you'd need to write code for the interface so you can comunicate with the Kinect, this asuming you found a way or created one to plug the kinect to your iOS device, then you would need to write code to capture the input provided from the Kinect and finally "recognize" manually the gestures. It would be way easier if Microsoft provided any SDK for this.

For the Leap it's a similar method however they have an SDK for OS X which probably can be ported to iOS

hope this gives you a little insight.

perrohunter
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  • Thanks for the reply. Yes, I am referring to "global gestures", but the thing will the gesture recognition still work if your app moves to the background ? The specific use-case is: The app (e.g. a screen capture app like display recorder) moves to the background and it should be able to recognize gestures on the display or in any other app currently active. – Hrishikesh_Pardeshi Jan 22 '13 at 18:10
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    Global gestures outside the app won't be possible as I don't think the SDK would allow an app to perform actions outside of it's main thread of execution, so if the app is in the background it wouldn't be allowed to keep recognizing gestures, that kind of global gestures outside of an app belong to the OS, Cydia tweaks and apps register attach processes to the OS so they can catch these global gestures, such as activator used by sbsettings – perrohunter Jan 22 '13 at 21:13
  • Exactly. So, I wanted to explore how are the cydia apps able to do that i.e. attach processes to OS and be able to globally recognize gestures. Any good starting point ? – Hrishikesh_Pardeshi Jan 23 '13 at 04:10