Android trackball events while screen is off.

Question

I'm looking for a way to grab trackball events while the screen is off, preferrably on a N1. I'm building my own music player and would love to add the feature to skip songs by trackball press, without having to unlock my device everytime.

I've found TrackBallSkip, however the source code has been taken down and integrated into CyanogenMod. I fear that I may need to do something exotic to my phone (root it, mod it, whatever). While this isn't a problem, I would be happier if I could freely share my Music player.

Can anyone confirm that I'll need to mod the home to get access to this functionality? Or can I just straight code it (if so, any pointers in the right direction would be amazing).

Thanks!

Answer 1

I found where Cyanogen put TrackBallSkip into their source base (this commit). It appears to reside in phone/com/android/internal/policy/impl/PhoneWindowManager.java which means it can't be implemented without modding the firmware (since the related package resides in /system).