[SeanA208]

I enjoy the idea of Flutter and the technology it demonstrates is quite impressive. I will say, however, it just doesn't seem like something that I could actually use on a day-to-day basis as it's faster and better on the battery to just press the play/pause or next/previous buttons on the keyboard (provided you have them). In fact, when I downloaded it, the only times I turned it on were to show my friends for novelty's sake.

[runeb]

I agree this seems to fall in the category of "neat but seemingly useless" since it actually takes more power and effort to do a simple task.

But its more interesting to look at these "novelty" interaction patterns as stepping stones and building blocks to future interfaces. Most new things look novel and useless until someone cherry-picks the bits and pieces and makes something really revolutionary with them.

tl;dr More weird things, please!

[dchichkov]

Yep. I very much agree.

I'll attempt to make a prediction: gesture based and other natural computer interactions will become common-place by 2020, primarily in living room and personal robotics applications.

And right now, it is at the stage slightly ahead of the time when touch screens were first introduced: http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/retroscan/...

[jaredsohn]

I have been working on an alternative solution for the same problem (for at least some use cases) which should work with less hassle.

Basically, with my program (http://www.mute.fm), your music will get paused/muted automatically whenever a video plays and will be restored afterward by monitoring the volumes of different processes.

This doesn't support the use case of needing to pause your music when you have a real life phone call, need to leave your desk, or have people gathered around your computer, though.