The Problem

People have to ask strangers to watch their belongings at public places

This is especially awkward when you have to leave multiple times, like at a library or a long work session at a coffee shop. Laptop thefts can occur aggressively (with owner present) or subtly in plain sight (when no one is paying attention). I wanted to focus on the latter.

The Solution

Alarming laptops when the user steps away

Detecting laptop lid closure in user's absence is most effective for identifying theft, as it's unlikely the thief would take the laptop out of the building with the lid open. To make this approach work, users would still sign out but leave the lid open, but most usually do that anyway. The program can remind them to do so at startup as well.

Avoiding laptop wreckage due to spontaneous drop

It was important to keep in mind that when someone other than the owner attempts to grab the laptop and the device makes an alarming sound, they will be startled and as a result might drop the device in response to the sound.

I did some user research about the thief getting scared when the alarm on the laptop rings and hence dropping it as a reflex action. Research suggests that if the laptop's alarm is set to go off when the lid is closed, and not after the thief has picked up the laptop, there will be no opportunity for the thief to drop the laptop as a reflex action in response to the alarm. Hence to address this, I am ensuring that the alarm will sound as soon as the lid is closed, before the thief can pick up the laptop. This should prevent the laptop from being dropped and prevent any physical damage.

How Clyde works

The illustration below describes the potential scenarios and how the program reacts to them as time progresses:

How to check if the owner has left?

In order to check if the user has left the laptop by itself, I conducted research on three possible options:

1. Have the user manually turn on the alarm and turn it off when they get back. [Manual]

2. Detect their presence with their phone and deactivate when they’re in a reasonable range [Automatic]

3. Detect their presence with their Apple Watch [Automatic]

I refined my design by giving the user both manual and automatic options for controlling their alarm. This required me to develop a way to communicate between their phone/watch and laptop, while also providing a manual toggle option to give the user more control. After conducting user research with 18 people I interviewed at local coffee shops, I was able to improve the flexibility of my design to give the user the ability to easily toggle the alarm manually, independently of their phone/watch.

The following is the outcome of the data I gathered after interviewing 18 people.

Communicating between Apple Watch/iPhone and the Mac

After researching, I found that Apple had no Swift framework in place to communicate between the Mac and the Watch. However, using iBeacons and some workarounds, I was able to use RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) values to understand the distance between the Mac and the Watch/Phone, and set a threshold of -50. If the RSSI value went below -50, and the lid was closed, the laptop's alarm would go off, alerting the owner that someone interacted with the laptop.

Detecting if the lid was closed

The program sends a shell command using swift and terminal interoperability to detect if the lid was closed. If it returned Yes, the function lidClosed( ) returns a value of True.

Manual toggle

Since a good chunk of people suggested their willingness to have a manual option to enable/disable the alarm, I decided to prioritize that in order to ship the first 0.1v of the app. As a result, my final 0.1 launch version looked as follows

It basically allowed you to toggle the alarm from the menu bar and walk away. If someone closed the lid in your absence, the alarm triggered. I talked to a professor who was an expert in audio rhetorics to come up with a sound that was loud enough to be heard after the lid was closed an would also alert the people nearby that something wrong was happening.

Audo Rhetorics

I realized that studying the sound infrastructure would be crucial to this case. I had to ensure that the sound was loud enough to be heard after the lid was closed and that it was convincing and irritating enough to provoke an emergency response or a strong emotional reaction when the alarm went off. To do this, I researched the speaker placement of various Macs, reached out to a professor of audio rhetorics and got her opinion. After testing around 10 sounds, we arrived at the following sound:

After researching medium-pitched sounds, we decided to add a medium pitch sound to the loop in addition to the existing high pitch sound, creating a loop of one high pitch sound and one medium pitch sound.

Current Status

The manual toggle version of Clyde was launched on January 26th and the reviews have been nothing less of impressive. I was not only able to understand the product market fit but also get valuable insights into why people wanted to use something like this. Additionally, my efforts to keep Clyde free were also highly appreciated. In March, I plant on launching the bluetooth version of Clyde that would toggle itself based off the user location and also notify them on their Apple Watch or iPhone about their laptop being in danger.

Clyde v1.0 can be downloaded for Mac devices at www.getcly.de