Wish your Android phone had one more hardware button, maybe for the camera? Of course you do; hardware buttons are great. With up-and-Kickstartering gadget called Pressy, you can add one yourself at the cost of clogging one headphone jack.
The concept is simple: you just slam the Pressy “button” into your headphone jack, start up the free app, and press to your heart’s content. What the button actually does is up to you. And to make things even better, the Pressy app can hook into Tasker(!), so a proficient tinkerer can use it to accomplish basically anything.
Adding hardware buttons to a device tends to range from ludicrous to impossible, so you’ve got to give it to the folks behind Pressy for coming up with an exceedingly clever solution. The only bummer is that plenty of us use our headphone jacks a lot. Way more often than we’d use a button. But if you happen to have some bluetooth headphones… Or, you know, hate music.
Pressy’s not a reality yet, but if you’d like to see it become one you can back the project on Kickstarter. In fact, you probably don’t even have to; its funding has jumped about $US5000 in the past half hour. Then again, Kickstarter is always a gamble, and there are plenty of ways this could suck. Like if it misfires all the time, or refuses to fire at all. We’ve all experienced the horror of a bad button.
But if you’re blinded by optimism like I am, you can “preorder” a Pressy for $US17, or one that comes with a detached-button-holding keychain for $US20. Not a bad deal for something that accomplishes the impossible. [Kickstarter via Reddit]