Do Not Disturb settings on Android aren't flexible enough

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 09:39:32 GMT

My first Android device was a Samsung Galaxy S2, back in 2012. If I remember rightly, the do not disturb setting was quite flexible - you selected it from the drop-down and then could set things like vibrate / alarms only / priority contacts only / absolute silence all from that bit of UI (which matches reasonably well with the official docs for Android <=8.1.

Nowadays[0], the only thing you can do immediately is turn Do Not Disturb on and control how long it'll be on for (until you turn off / for X hours / until alarm time (if one is currently set)). Sure, you can long-press and end up in the relevant bit of settings, but that's a relatively unfriendly UI, and it sets how DND behaves until you go poking through the settings UI again.

I want something more like the old behaviour (and I don't think I'm just being neophobic) - particularly, I want it to be easy to do things like: "I'm going to bed, only let priority contacts / repeat callers disturb me" and "I'm at choir, I want absolute silence no matter what" and "Vibrations only" from the main screen (or, ideally, the lock screen). I also want it to be obvious/easy to see what DND is going to do (so I don't accidentally enable the wrong sort of DND when turning it on).

Is there some tool to do this that I'm missing? It's not even clear if this sort of setting-tweaking can be done from an app (I can't immediately find a flutter package to do so, for example)...

[0] I think the switch may have been when I got my FP2, but it might have been a software update instead

comments

Slightly more general dealing sheets; Android again

Mon, 10 May 2021 14:37:52 GMT

Shuffling is not the most interesting part of card games, and folk are often not that good at it; you get more interesting bridge hands if a computer shuffles, for example. Also, I've been looking at playing cards that are more suitable for outdoor use, and they tend to be less easy to shuffle. Which has got me thinking about dealing sheets again (and thus Android apps).

When playing bridge in person (such a long time ago now!) I've been dealing off a friend's handy web dealing sheets - each number tells you which pile to put the card onto, and you end up with a properly-random bridge deal.

Bridge works really well for this approach - you deal out all the cards, and their order within a hand doesn't matter. So using a dealing sheet is basically no more effort than dealing from a shuffled deck in the usual manner.

There are plenty of games where this approach doesn't work so well - games like patience or Bezique where you need to order the entire deck (I'm not sure if there's a not-totally-awful way to do that). I think there are intermediate classes of games where the deal is more hasslesome, but the wins of not having to shuffle (and always getting well-shuffled hands) might still make a dealing-sheet a viable approach...

Take cribbage - you'd still deal into four piles - two hands of six, the starter, and the rest of the deck. And most of the time you could stop part-way through the deck (I'm sure one could calculate the expected distribution of end-points...). So you could have a very similar output, and add a "stop" instruction rather than printing out the rest of the "put all these cards onto the 'rest of deck' pile".

Which brings me back round to thinking about a smartphone app - the webpage is great for bridge, and for places where you have a network connection, but I do wonder if a dealing app would be useful for offline use (and could be extended to support other deal types). Last time I collected opinions on app development there were some interesting suggestions for my stated preferences of Free, drivable from the command-line/my editor, and buildable for F-droid. I have subsequently become aware of Nativescript (for various varieties of JavaScript, none of which I speak), Kotlin (seemingly the new default Android language), and Flutter (a new language and framework entirely). I don't know if anyone's tried any of those (or other approaches)...?

comments

Matthew's Journal

Do Not Disturb settings on Android aren't flexible enough

Slightly more general dealing sheets; Android again