Posts Tagged Applications

Automating your Android phone with Tasker : Part 1

Posted by ekrunch in Technology, Useful Information on October 16, 2011

For those of you with an Android phone, you need to get Tasker. If you don’t have it, you’re missing out on a truly great application. It’s described as “Total Automation for Android” by the author, but what does that mean for you? Well it’s simple really, your phone does things, you do things in response to that. Tasker can do most of that for you. Let me put that in a few practical examples.

  • You like to disable your Wifi radio to save power, but you want it running when you’re at home or at work. Tasker can do this for you by looking at what cell towers your connected to. (More on this later, but it’s ridiculously awesome and doesn’t burn battery like using the GPS does)
  • You get home, your phone gets in range of Wifi and connects automatically. Normally, you’d want your ringer on and at max volume. Tasker can detect that you’re connected to your home Wifi network and setup the ringer for you.
  • You get into your car and plug your phone in. Normally, you’d want the wifi turned off, 4G turned on, hotspot enabled, and the car panel application started. Tasker can do all of that for you.
  • When you boot your phone, you need your phone setup a certain way. I like mine with the Display Rotation turned off, brightness on auto, display timeout at 30 seconds, WiMax off, etc. Tasker does all of that for me.
  • The Wifi sticks sometimes, but cycling it fixes the problem. Tasker cycles my Wifi for me every night and I no longer have issues.
  • Because I disable rotation, I lose the ability to view the Gallery and Browser in landscape mode. Tasker enables it for me whenever I start the Gallery and Browser applications and disables it when I exit them. This prevents my phone from entering landscape mode on my home screen (which drives me nuts) but lets me use rotation in the applications that I select.
  • Tasker can also create shortcuts/widgets to tasks, this allows you to perform many steps at once, such as my Wifi cycle task. This is also handy for things like my ringer enable task, which also sets the volume levels after it enables the ringer so my phone is always at the volumes I like.

And that’s just the beginning of what is possible with Tasker.

Part of the problem with Tasker is understanding what everything is. Most people probably haven’t read the Tasker manual (tl;dr), so let’s go over some Tasker terminology.

    • Action – A single thing that you want Tasker to do, like Turning the Wifi Radio on.
    • Task – A collection of actions. Tasks can contain one or many actions. An important thing to remember about Tasks is that you can call one Task from another Task. This will come in handy for repeating common tasks.
    • Profile – Profiles are used to define the states of when to execute tasks. Basically, you “enter” a profile when your phone matches all of the criteria of the profile, and you “exit” a profile when it no longer matches. You are allowed to define a task for entry and exit of profiles. This is how you correlate your tasks to what your phone is doing and teach it how to respond accordingly.

In this first article, I’m going to demonstrate my most common uses for Tasker.

First off, go download Tasker from the Android Market. (More links and a QR code at the bottom of this post)

Now that Tasker is installed, fire it up. It requires no real configuration so no need to worry about that yet. The first thing you want to do is change to the Flat view of your profiles. Contextual is great once you get the hang of Tasker, but for now, we’ll go with Flat. So at the Tasker screen, hit Menu -> View -> Flat.

Creating some tasks

The first thing you’re going to want to do is create some common tasks. These are things that you want to do from many profiles, like set the ringer volume. We’ll start by creating 3 tasks.

      • From the main screen, hit the Lightning Bolt icon (It’s the 4th one on the toolbar).
      • Now hit “New Task”. Name it “Ringer Enable”.
      • Hit the check mark and you’ll be at the Task Edit screen.

In my ringer enable profile, I like to set enable the ringer, and then set all of the volumes in one task. This way, the volume is always right. So first, let’s enable the ringer.

      • Hit the blue “+” button.
      • Go to “Audio”, then “Silent Mode”.
      • Set “Mode” to “Off” and hit the Green check mark.

Now let’s set the volumes.

      • Hit the “+” again, go to “Audio”, then “Alarm Volume”, set it to maximum volume (For me, that’s “7″).
      • Hit the check mark.
      • Now do the same for Notification Volume, Ringer Volume, and System Volume.

In addition to this, I like to add a popup notification.

      • Hit “+” again, go to “Alert”, then “Flash”. In the “Text” field, enter “Audio Mode”.

When you’re done, the task should look something like this.

Ringer Enable in Tasker

You now have a task that will setup your ringer the way you like it and notify you that it’s done. You’ll use this task a lot later.

Now create a Task called Ringer Disable, except this time set Silent Mode to “On” and set the Alert to “Silent Mode”. Don’t bother adjusting the volume controls this time. They’re all irrelevant since the ringer is off. Create one last task called “Ringer Vibrate” with Silent Mode set to “Vibrate” and the alert set to “Vibrate Mode”. You now have a base set of tasks to control the sound levels on your phone. For me, this alone was a life saver.

Here is what the other two ringer tasks look like.

Ringer Slient in Tasker

Ringer Vibrate in Tasker

Putting your tasks to work using profiles.

Now that we have some basic tasks in place, let’s put them to work. To do that, let’s create a profile. First off, let’s do a startup profile. In this profile, we’re going to setup the ringer, disable rotation, etc.

      • From the main menu, hit green “+” button on the toolbar.
      • Name the Profile “Startup”.
      • In the dialog box that pops up (First Context), select “Event”
      • Select “System”, then “Device Boot”
      • Hit the green check mark and when the Task Selection dialog pops up, select “New Task”.
      • Name it “Device Bootup”
      • In this task, first add an action to kill display rotation. (Display -> Display Rotation -> Off)
      • Now setup your desired brightness. I like automatic mode so I add an Action for it. (Display -> Auto Brightness -> On)
      • Disable your WiMax (this is handy if you have a phone that has the annoying habit of turning on 4G every time it reboots, thus draining the crap out of your battery for no reason). The action is under Net -> WiMax. Set it to off.

Now it’s time to turn the ringer on. Because we already have a task for it, let’s just call that task instead of repeating the same tasks.

      • Add an action to call the Ringer Enable task. Hit the + button, then select “Task”, then “Perform Task”. Press the magnifying glass that’s about the “Name” field and select your “Ringer Enable” task.

Your phone is now setup to configure itself the way you want it every time you reboot it.

This is what my Device Boot task looks like.

Device Bootup in Tasker

This concludes part one of this article. Next time, I’ll go over executing tasks based on what cell towers you’re near. This is one of my favorite features as it lets me control the behavior of my phone when I’m near home or my office. Used in concert with the “Wifi Connected” state, it allows me shut the Wifi off when I’m not near areas that don’t have it, but turn it on when I get close, and then setup the phone the way I like it for those certain areas. If you have Bluetooth for your car, you can use the “Bluetooth Connected” state to know when you’re in the car and act accordingly.

Enjoy the beginnings of Tasker! Be sure to hit the Tasker site and check out the documentation for more examples, then hit the Tasker Wiki for some really wild examples of what you can do with Tasker. Be forewarned, a lot of the stuff on the Wiki is very advanced, so get some practice under your belt before you dive into the advanced tasks.

Tasker Homepage Link
Tasker Market Link
Tasker Wiki Link
QR Code :
Android Market Link for Tasker

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More Android apps!

Posted by ekrunch in Technology, Useful Information on August 28, 2010

Since my last post on my favorite Android apps, I’ve found more that I like and decided to share them. I’ll skip the intro and just get right into the meat of things!

Enjoy the apps and thanks for the suggestions last time!

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My favorite Android apps so far!

Posted by ekrunch in Technology, Useful Information on July 24, 2010

I’ve had several friends recently take the Android plunge and ask me what apps that i’m using, so I decided to write them up in a list for everyone to enjoy and comment on. They’re listed in no particular order and I’ve provided a link to them in the doubleTwist app catalog so you can read a description and scan the QR code to install.

If you’re new to Android, this app is the first thing you need to install. With it, you can scan the square bar codes (QR codes) on the app pages and your Android device will fire right into the market and let you install the app. So simple! Check out the description and icon on the following page, then search the Android market on your device and load the one with the same icon. It’s free and it works.

Once you’re ready with that, you’re going to need a good keyboard. I’ve said it before, and i’ll say it again. Swype is the way to go. It’s currently in Beta right now so you won’t be able to get it from the Android market, but trust me when I tell you that it’s worth signing up for the Beta and replacing your old keyboard with the Swype one. Here’s the link to the developer’s site. Give Swype a week as your default input method and you won’t go back.

Now that you’re able to Swype and ready to barcode scan, check out the following links and load some apps!

I hope you enjoy these apps as much as I have. Feel free to comment on them or make recommendations of your own.

Special Thanks to House of The Faculty for providing me with some updates and several of these apps.

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