App Developer and Roundarch Isobar tech lead Mike DiGiovanni have been making waves in the Glass development community with two important functional apps: Launchy, a setting hack allowing sideloaded APK’s to be launched, and GlassAuth, an app which brings Google Two Factor authentication to Glass development with a visual scanning method. Now, he’s published both apps to GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license.

Launchy on GitHub

A way to launch native apps on Google Glass.

Build and deploy Launchy to your Glass device

Scroll over to settings in GlassHome and select that. You should get a typical Android dialog that gives you the option of picking GlassHome or Launchy for this action. Select Launchy and check the box to always use Launchy.

Now whenever you go to Settings in GlassHome, Launchy will pop up. If you actually need to get to Glass settings, Launchy provides a permanent link for that.

So why do we need this app?

Glass provides no permanent way to launch native apps. If you deploy and run an app, as soon as the screen goes off GlassHome takes over and you can not run your app again.

How’d you do that?

GlassHome has a handful of local Activities that are launched, but many of these are launched by Package and Class name. We lucked out because settings was simply launched with an action that we can intercept and have Launchy take over from there.

GlassAuth on GitHub

Get your 2-step authentication codes on Google Glass.

Grab the ZXing barcode scanner for Android. Install it on your Google Glass device. (This would be an ideal patch for someone to submit, since there’s no technical reason for not just using the library inside of the app.)

Build and deploy GlassAuth.

On the first run, you will need to scan the generated barcode for 2-step authentication prior to use. After that, you will be able to view anything you need to.

Interested in collaborating? Ping Mike on Google+.