Driving comes with enough possible distractions without throwing a smartphone into the equation, but unless you turn the thing off then there’s a pretty good possibility that you’ll get a few alerts through when you’re driving. With Twitter, Facebook and other apps constantly pushing alerts to us alongside good old fashioned text messages and phone calls, there’s never any shortage of things trying to grab our attention. When you’re behind the wheel though, it’s not the kind of thing you want!
If your smartphone of choice happens to sport a recent version of Android – 4.3 only – then you might want to give Botifier a whirl. It’s free, and if you have the required hardware to make it work, then it’s possibly one of the coolest ideas we’ve seen in a while.
Dubbed as push notifications for Bluetooth devices, Botifier will send notifications from your smartphone to a device that supports AVRCP 1.3, such as a Bluetooth-enabled car sound system. The result is notifications being pushed to that system with the app name showing as the artist, the summary as the album name and the notification text being displayed as the track title. That text can also be split across multiple track names, too.
Users can control the notifications using their sound system’s next/previous track controls to navigate through notifications as well as the play/pause buttons to remove them.
The app, created by XDA-Developer forum member Grimpy is completely free and, importantly, open source. If anyone has the means or the interest to fork Botifier they can do so via Grimpy’s Github page.
Little apps like this are the kind of thing that Android is known for, and it’s certainly not an app that would, or indeed could be made to work on iOS. That is, unless we’re talking about jailbroken devices, that is.
Still, if you fulfill the requirements of running the app – Android 4.3 in particular – and supporting hardware, then it’s highly recommended that you give the app a shot. Face it, it’s never any harm to try out free software, now is it? There really isn’t, so head over to the source link below and get started!
(Source: XDA-Developers forum thread)
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