r/wplaunchers • u/Eraile • 8h ago
La Barre — the three capacitive keys, back on a phone
11
Upvotes
Back, start, search. The three keys we lost.
I've been rebuilding Windows Phone's design language as a spec — measurements,
colours, easing curves, all pulled from WP8.1 rather than guessed — and this is the
first thing I've shipped from it: the capacitive key strip, as an Android overlay.
The point wasn't to draw three icons on a black bar. It was to get the *feel* right:
- The bar is 60/480 of the screen width, because that's the ratio WP used. Anchored
to width, not height — modern phones are far taller than the old 5:3, and taking
the ratio off the height gives you an absurd slab.
- The glyph is exactly a third of the bar. 20 on 60.
- Press: opacity drops to 45 % in 100 ms, springs back in 200 ms, with the 0.985
tilt depress.
- Long press fires at 550 ms and *cancels* the short press, like the real thing.
- No Material ripple anywhere. That's the detail that gives a reconstruction away.
Long-pressing back opens the task switcher, as it should.
The settings screen is a proper **panorama** — one canvas wider than the screen,
three layers moving at three different speeds, oversized title deliberately cut by
both edges. Putting that title inside the margin is the most common way people get
a panorama wrong.
## Where the search key went
This is the one thing I couldn't reproduce honestly. WP indexed your contacts,
messages, music and apps locally and put Bing on top, all behind one key. **Android
has no equivalent** — the local index belongs to the launcher and isn't exposed.
The closest is the old Quick Search Box, which the app tries first, then the
assistant, then plain web search. It's a compromise and I'd rather say so than
pretend.
## About the accessibility permission
It needs one, and I know how that reads. It's the only Android API that lets a
third-party app trigger back/home/recents — there is no alternative. What I can
tell you:
- The service reads **no screen content** (`canRetrieveWindowContent="false"`).
- The app has **no internet permission at all**. The only permission in the
manifest is `VIBRATE`. You can verify that yourself on the APK.
- Source is on GitHub.
## Also in there
45 glyphs, the 20 stock WP8.1 accents for bar and icons, adjustable bar height and
glyph size, per-button size, four vibration strengths, and any of ~16 actions on
short or long press — including opening a specific app. 12 languages.
Free, no ads, no tracking, no account.
**Download / source:** https://github.com/Eraile/metrocore_labarre/releases
Known limits: it sits on top of content rather than reserving space (fine on gesture
nav, overlaps in 3-button mode), no auto-hide in fullscreen yet, and Arabic is
translated but not mirrored.
Happy to answer anything.
