Another main difference is in capitalization: local variables use all lowercase but global variables have at least one uppercase letter in their name. Tasker is a powerful, complex, and flexible automation and programming app, but it can be intimidating. It has a steep learning curve. It takes time to become familiar with it, and much more to be proficient, but the time will definitely be worth it.
How to use Tasker to take Android to the next level In this tutorial, learn the basics of how to use Tasker, an automation and programming app for Android. How To By Edgar Cervantes. Profile — Some sort of container or package for contexts and linked tasks. You can define several contexts for a single profile, and all those conditions must be true for the linked tasks to run.
Task — A group of actions. Usually linked to a trigger or context, but can also be a free-floating, standalone task executed manually. Scene — A custom-made user interface. You can create your own layout of buttons, menus, popups, and other UI elements. Variable — A name for an unknown value that can change over time, like the battery level or the date. Projects You can create Project tabs, which essentially work as folders for organizing profiles, tasks, scenes, and variables.
Main menu The main menu button is located in the top-right corner. Also: These are the best productivity apps Set up permissions and grant access Tasker has the power to control your phone extensively, but you must first give it permission.
Open Tasker. Hit the 3-dot menu button. Select More. Remember the Battery Saving task I mentioned earlier? Now when the battery is at the action you set up before, it will run.
Tasker is one useful app that every Android user should have, but it just may be too complicated for some. If you consider yourself to be an intermediate Android user, give it a try. Rahul is a tech geek, author, blogger, podcaster, YouTuber and a keen learner.
Rahul enjoys learning, testing, and messing up with new tips and tricks, apps, and gadgets. He has been writing for several years and has even contributed to popular Magazines like Huffington Post.
These emphases, reflected in the title, are equally important for chemistry majors and for those who learn chemistry as a preparation for studies in other disciplines. The CHACR student will arrive at this appreciation of chemistry as a human endeavor within the context of a body of knowledge that is clearly and rigorously presented, at an appropriate level for first-year university students. Weaver and John McMurry in pdf from following download links. Kindly follow the instructions to unlock the download link s.
When there are several tasks in the queue at once, it's important to understand how they are handled:. Task priority, 0 to 50 inclusive with 0 being lowest, is determined according to whatever causes the task to run. Wait and Wait Until are special cases.
The rules for handling them are complicated and try to do the 'best thing' dependent on the situation. Enter1 and Enter2 are both guaranteed to finish before either of Exit1 or Exit2. Whether Enter1 or Enter2 finishes first depends on their relative priority. Same for Exit1 and Exit2. All 4 tasks compete based on priority against tasks from other profiles. Exit tasks have a higher base priority so will finish before Enter tasks.
If the profile goes active and inactive quickly, Enter1, Enter2, Exit1 and Exit2 will all compete purely on priority. Since Exit tasks have higher base priority, Exit1 and Exit2 will probably finish first.
If a particular action is a setting , that will be indicated on the right-hand side of the action. If an action has had a condition set for it, the condition is shown with a red or green bar next to it; green indicates that the condition is currently met the action will execute , red indicates the opposite.
Of course, when the task is executed it could be that it changes things so that the condition is then met. The colours have the same significance as for individual action conditions described above.
If an action is within a For loop it is displayed indented with a grey margin. The Play button will run the task right through till the end, the Step button will run a single task each time it's pressed.
During tasting, the current action is shown with an arrow and the next task with a faded arrow. The success of each action is shown when it finishes with a green action OK or red action failed circle. Long-click the Play or Test button to manually set the priority of the task when it runs during the test.
Please be aware that setting a lower priority can result in interference from other tasks running which are e. Tip: pressing the Step button while a task is playing will cause the task to switch to stepping mode when the current action finishes. Bottom-right is a help button. Please be sure to read the action help of every action before you use it for the first time, there may be e. When more than one condition is specified, they must be combined via And all conditions must be true , Or at least one condition must be true or Xor exactly one must be true.
These 'combiners' are called boolean operators. Usually, 2 or 3 conditions will be combined with all And s or all Or s, but in order to allow more complicated logic, Tasker also offers And and Or in high-precedence versions. Of the 4 boolean operators which are available, the selection goes from low to high precedence ones. The higher the precedence of a boolean operator, the further to the right it is shown.
This enables the logical groups to be visualised. Note that the order of the conditions can mean that some conditions are never evaluated.
For instance, when two conditions are present and the one above an And is false then the condition below it will never be evaluated. This can be advantageous if the second condition takes relatively more resources e. By default, if an action fails with an error e. In addition, if it's checked, errors will be logged in the system log as diagnostics instead of errors and error popups will be surpressed. A label for the action which is shown on the Task Edit screen.
This parameter could also be used to add comments to actions to help understand how the task works. Labels are also used with Goto actions to jump from one part of the task to another. Menu Options Search Search for and jump to a specified action.
The entered term is searched against action properties in the following order:. The matching is case-insensitive. Searching starts from the current action and wraps around. Only the header action If or For of closed blocks is searched. A scene is a graphical user-interface consisting of a collection of elements to which tasks can be attached to be run when the user interacts with them e.
Tasker uses scenes for things like popup dialogs, menus and getting input from the user but scenes can actually be displayed by the user whenever desired, meaning they can be used for things like creating simple user-designed applications or showing extra controls over the top of selected existing applications. Scenes are completely user-customisable via a drag-and-drop graphical editor. The parameters specified in the action are applied to the scene before it is show.
For instance, if the scene has a Title element it will be set to the title specified in the action and the scene resized appropriately. It might be desirable to have a different style for e. Usually, only Show Scene and Destroy Scene will be used, however sometimes it's useful for a scene to be created but not visible to the user:. An element has three main components: Geometry It's size and position on the screen.
An element's geometry is specified in the scene editor. Content How it looks on the screen. Specified under the UI tab in the element editor. Some elements also have a Background tab. A Menu element has an additional Items tab. Event Tasks What should happen when the user interacts with the element. Specified under the right-most tabs after clicking on the element in the element editor.
There are different events depending on the type of element. For instance, a Button has tap and long-tap events while a Slider has a value-set event. Note that actions that affect scene elements can only be used when the scene has already been created via Create Scene or Show Scene.
The scene does not have to be visible. When moving and resizing, the sides of elements are snapped to a grid to make alignment easier. Element Picker Allows selection of an element by name. This is most useful when an element is difficult to directly click on due to other elements or because it's very small.
Both short and long clicks on the element names behave the same as short and long clicks on the element itself. However, there is a special case where it's a good idea to specify a background colour even if you already have a background element.
A scene is resized to fit the container into which it's placed, but in some cases e. In such a case, the margins are coloured with the background colour specified here. The geometry position and size of each element can be configured independently for portrait and landscape display orientations by rotating the device to the desired orientation in the editor.
If no geometry is configured for a particular orientation when the scene is displayed, Tasker will attempt to fit the elements into the scene based on the geometry of the elements in the other orientation. In the case of manual specification, click on the Items tab in the element editor to specify the items. Selected items are highlighted. There are two ways to find out the selected items: assign a task under the Item Tap element event tab. Each item has exactly the same layout.
To change the layout, click on it. Each Menu element has it's own unique item layout. There are two pre-defined layouts you can choose from click the magnifying glass icon. Note that the Value Selected event will only fire when scrolling has finished i.
The default initially showing item is selectable via the checkboxes on the left. Note that by default, a spinner is text only. To show also icons, long-click the icon element in the Item Layout see below and select Show. Note that if Text contains a variable, any changes in the variable value once the element have been shown will not be reflected in the visible contents of the text box.
The reason for this limitation is that the user can change the text box contents by typing at any time so it is not possible to track where the variable contents should be, or even if they are still there at all. If checked, the content in the WebView is allowed access to local device files, data stores, and can run JavaScript, including Tasker's JavaScript Interface functions. This is a very powerful feature, since it allows a WebView to present a complex and highly functional interface, but should only be enabled if you entirely trust the source of the specified content.
Note that references to local files must be absolute include the directory even when the WebView source is specified as a file e. If checked, links will be handled by the WebView itself, otherwise they will be passed to the system for handling e. If this parameter is not checked, HTML elements which generate a popup window, for instance selection elements in forms, will crash the scene when they are activated.
If this parameter is checked, when the scene is hidden and reshown, some of its state will be lost e. Allows configuration of the properties of a scene element. The different types of property are divided into tabs. Starting from the left, the controls are: selection checkbox this is only present when Selection Mode is set to Single or Multi.
It stipulates whether the item will be shown as selected when the menu is displayed. If you don't want to show an icon, hide the icon element in the Layout parameter in the UI tab label text the label to show for the item.
If you don't want to show a label, hide the label element in the Layout parameter in the UI tab action button an action to run when the item is tapped To add an item, click the plus button at the bottom of the screen. Items can be rearranged and deleted by click-and-dragging at the right hand side.
If you want to use an image for a background, create a separate Image element and place it underneath. Event Tabs Event tabs stipulate what Tasker should do when the user interacts with the element in some way. When the scene is showing, the event will also occur if an action probably Element Value sets the element.
Most events consist only of a task to specify but some allow a filter specification so that the task only runs if the event matches the filter. To help the task to decide what to do with the event and to allow a single task to handle many different events if desired, Tasker sets certain local variables which give specific information about it. The variables are easily accessible by clicking the usual variable tag icon in any action in the task.
This event is triggered whenever the text changes e. Text entry is buffered so that it may be up to 1 or 2 seconds before new input is seen, and that input may include several accumulated changes. This event is triggered when the element gains or loses focus, probably because the user has tapped it or another focusable element.
Note that the Finished event will never occur if the Video element has the Loop parameter checked. Starting with Android 5. Unless certain steps are taken, Tasker may not function as expected, either because Android is not sending it the needed signals in order to save power or because Android is even killing Tasker.
A commonly noticed symptom is that profiles with Time contexts don't activate or deactivate at the expected time. If Never is selected, Android may group alarms together so they go off too late. On some devices, Android may even kill Tasker at times if Never is selected. On a rooted device, it may be possible to change the battery optimiation parameters depending on the functionality you need from Tasker.
An example app for this purpose is Naptime. Tasker allows creation of completely standalone apps APK files which have no requirement for Tasker to be installed on the device they're used on. The intention is to allow people to create their own apps for fun, for sale or just to share with friends. Or if you are concerned about all the permissions Tasker needs you can create an app that has only the permissions you require!
To create apps, you need the following on your device not necessarily on the device s the app will run on :. App creation is accessed by long-clicking on a project not the base project or task and selecting Export then As App. Any linked resources needed e. To export anything except a single task, you need to create a project and put anything you wish to export in the project.
To generate apps, Tasker needs a free helper app called Tasker App Factory. It's available on Play Store and from the Tasker website. Tasker should now start generating your app, which will take maybe 12 seconds depending on your device. We can't run the app straight away though because it hasn't been installed. Click on the rightmost bottom button with the Android icon to ask Android to install your app.
Once Android is done installing, you can click it's Open button to run the app, or you can simply go to the home screen and click on the app's icon in the launcher. When in Beginner Mode, and if you only have one task to install, Tasker will make guesses about how to configure the resulting app. More usually, before an app is generated you will be presented with a configuration screen which lets you specify various options for the new app.
Android requires that all apps be signed i. By default, Tasker uses an automatically-generated insecure certificate to sign apps and doesn't bother mentioning it. However, if you want to release an app via a public site Play Store for example , you will need to sign it with a proper secure certificate. That's done so the site knows that it's you that's giving them the app each time you submit a new version.
Certificates are kept in a keystore which is protected with a password. Once you've generated the keystore, Tasker will often need to ask you for the certificate password before app generation so that it can be used to sign each new version of your app. If Android's backup service is enabled in Android settings, Tasker makes a backup of the keystore there. It's highly advisable to make a copy of that file and keep it safe away from your device. Android accessibility support changed in Android 4.
If support is needed for accessibility services in 4. If support is required pre Google Play Store allows publication of APKs targetting different Android versions under the same package name, however this has not been tested by the developer of Tasker. When the specified launch task runs in the child app, the following local variables will be available to it:.
Most child apps include a service which constantly monitors for events. If you know that you don't need to monitor events anymore in-between app launches you can use the Disable action in the Tasker category to stop it. The new app does not take over any preferences from Tasker, all of the preferences in the child app are in their default state, with a couples of exceptions. Despite the misleading name, you can use the Set Tasker Pref action in the Tasker category in the child app to change some of the child's preferences when it is running.
The Test action in the Misc category allows you to check which Tasker features are available at run time when the app is being used. Tip: to include a dynamic image e. When the new app is launched, it checks that all referenced plugins are installed on the device and prompts the user to install missing ones.
Some plugins may not work on other devices if they themselves store something about the action to be performed, since that data will not be available on the other device. If SL4A is missing on the target device, the new app will prompt the user to download when launched. If a new version of the app is reinstalled on the target device, the new versions of the scripts will be written if the length has changed. The data for Maps is provided by Google and they require a maps key v2 for each developer that uses it.
If you are using Map scene elements in your app, you need a key from Google that can be included with your app. Note that the box will only be presented if your app uses one or more Map scene elements. Note that the device on which the created app is used needs Google's Play Services APK installed, otherwise the map elements will not function.
Code for encryption is included in any app created by App Factory, however if you don't use encryption features it's unlikely to be a problem in terms of export restrictions. However, that is an opinion, it is not legal advice.
Note that code libraries for encryption are included with every Android device. Tasker and child apps use these libraries to perform the encryption, they do not contain encryption code themselves. You are free to distribute and sell apps created by Tasker in any way you wish. No licence fees to the developer of Tasker are necessary. Please note that use of images from some Ipacks in commercial software is prohibited by the licence terms of the image creators.
You will need to contact the image designer to request their assent in such cases. Tapping on the icon of the widget shows a configuration screen where the timer can be configured.
Tapping on the timer section of the widget will pause, restart or reset the timer, depending on its current state. Note that the timer updates more rarely when it is still a long way from expiry in order to minimize power usage. Use the Configuration Screen to configure what should happen when the icon is clicked or the timer expires, in the case of a Task Timer widget. Take care to select an appropriate name and icon for the task, as these will appear on the home screen.
On the other hand, if you associate a normal named task with a widget or shortcut then when the task is changed via the Task Edit screen the function of the widget or shortcut also changes. Click and hold on the icon in the Android home screen until the dustbin icon appears. Drag the widget or shortcut icon to the dustbin icon and release. In Beginner Mode, Tasker attempts to simplify things for inexperienced users, mostly by UI elements which are unlikely to be needed by inexperienced users.
In the userguide, when references are found to things which do not appear on the screen. It's worth disabling Beginner Mode to see if that's the problem. Note: CPU control can damage your hardware e.
As for all Tasker functions, you use it at your own risk! On a rooted device only Tasker is able to control the CPU frequency of an Android device to some extent. This is usually done either to save battery or make the device more responsive depending on the circumstances. The relevant control action is CPU in the Misc category. You will need to experiment with combinations of these to achieve the best results. Name the task. Send Text Messages on Low Battery This automation task will help you when you have a dead phone or no way to communicate.
Then: Choose State. Select Power , and tap Battery Level. Set the battery level at which you want to auto-send text messages. Give a new name to the task. Type the recipients that you want to send the text to, and enter the message you would like to send. Secure Specific Apps with Tasker There are many apps that can lock your apps.
Follow the below steps; Create a new Profile and select Application. Choose all the apps you want to lockdown.
Return to the Profiles tab, and add a new task and name it. Select Display , then tap Lock. Type in the code you want to use to lock those apps. Now, any time you open those specific apps, you will need to type your password to launch them. Read Messages While Driving Using your mobile anyways while driving is very dangerous. To set up this automation, first you need to have Tasker read SMS messages when the phone is docked: Create a new profile, and select State.
Choose Hardware , select Docked , and under Type , choose Car. Return to the Profiles tab, and tap Plus to add a new task and name it. Add a new task by tapping Plus and choose Tasker , then Profile Status. In the Profiles tab, create another profile. Select Event , then tap Phone , Received Text. Under Type , tap Any. Back on the Profiles tab, add a new task by tapping Plus.
0コメント