When Automatic moved earlier this year, our lead Android developer Duncan Carroll found himself spending more time in the car. And something was missing.
“I have a dumb car,” laments Duncan. “All my friends’ cars have screens. I want a screen, too.”
Driving more meant more navigating, more podcasts, more text messages to his wife, and, honestly, more distractions. It was untenable. But so was buying a new car with the latest infotainment tech.
There had to be a better solution. So Duncan built his own.
“AutoDash is what I wanted Android Auto to be,” he says, referring to the watered-down Android experience that’s just beginning to make its way into new cars. “I wanted more than just navigation, messaging, and music. And there was nothing out there that could really do what I wanted.”
So when we launched our SDK earlier this year, Duncan had an idea: what if he made a car-friendly launcher for Android that could tap into the thousands of widgets already available? And what if it would start as soon as you turn the key?
That was the goal, and the result is AutoDash, Duncan’s custom launcher with a dynamic map, unlimited widgets, shortcuts, and apps – all built atop the Automatic SDK and all done in about two weeks’ worth of coding.
“I didn’t have to write 10,000 lines of new code to put this together,” says Duncan. “Because Android is open source, I could use a lot of existing code for the launcher.”
He also wanted to keep it easy, for two reasons.
First, “It wasn’t terribly complicated to build,” says Duncan. “And when you’re talking about a widget dashboard, people are going to make it their own anyway, so I didn’t want to get in the way of that.”
Secondly, “With 20 percent time, a lot of projects get started but don’t get finished,” he says. “I didn’t want this to turn into some hydra. I wanted to get it out there.”
Using Android and the Automatic SDK allowed Duncan to bring the features he wanted to AutoDash quickly and easily. And getting it to launch when starting the car was just a matter of injecting 15-20 lines worth of code to recognize the ignition-on event.
“It’s a simple idea,” Duncan says. “You just couldn’t do this before.”
Duncan used AutoDash for a little over a month before releasing it to the world, and during that time, he’s found some widgets are perfectly suited for quick actions that don’t distract him. Others… not so much.
“I’ve got widgets I use all that time for creating voice memos and Google Voice search – there’s a lot of power there,” says Duncan. He uses the ETA text feature to let his wife and friends know how long he’ll be. But he also wanted to set some constraints for widgets that would take his eyes off the road. “Anything with lots of text is just a bad idea,” he says, and notes that the setting to hide distracting widgets is enabled by default.
But he’s not done developing yet.
On the roadmap is support for landscape mode, a recommended widgets tab, and even parsing calendar events to find conference calls then automatically dial in, complete with the code. He’s also talking about taking basic heuristics beyond just looking at the calendar to enable more Google Now-like functionality.
“It’s 9 AM. My phone knows I’m headed to work and just automatically sets that as the navigation destination when I start the car,” Duncan uses as an example. “Our data science efforts will result in more efficient routing, so there’s plenty of untapped potential.”
Now that it’s shipped and the feedback is rolling in, there’s no doubt in Duncan’s mind that he’ll continue to keep expanding and refining AutoDash.
“I’m going to continue this as my 20-percent project,” says Duncan. “I’m committed.”
The post 20 Percent: How We Made Our Dumb Cars Smarter With AutoDash appeared first on Automatic Blog.