Tasker: One App to Rule Them All

My thanks to kcoram for this pointer to Tasker, which has to be the most insanely complicated but useful app ever written for a phone. It's Android-only, and likely to stay Android-only, because it's a bit hard to imagine Apple allowing anybody to do anything this powerful on an iPhone.

Basically, it's a visual, event-based programming environment for your Android phone. You describe a particular state (a time range, an application running, turning the phone upside-down, whatever) and what you want to do during that state (change the brightness, turn off the sound, move files, play music, etc), and it will do that at the appropriate times. From the look of it, it's preposterously flexible: there's an entire wiki (and not a tiny one) dedicated to how to make use of it. I suspect that it's not my mother's cup of tea, but for the power-tools geek who wants to make their phone really behave, it looks completely charming.

I've only just started playing with it, but I figure that, for six bucks, it's well worth the money for any one of the dozens of things I can probably use it for. Fabulous little toy...

Tasker: One App to Rule Them All

My thanks to kcoram for this pointer to Tasker, which has to be the most insanely complicated but useful app ever written for a phone. It's Android-only, and likely to stay Android-only, because it's a bit hard to imagine Apple allowing anybody to do anything this powerful on an iPhone.

Basically, it's a visual, event-based programming environment for your Android phone. You describe a particular state (a time range, an application running, turning the phone upside-down, whatever) and what you want to do during that state (change the brightness, turn off the sound, move files, play music, etc), and it will do that at the appropriate times. From the look of it, it's preposterously flexible: there's an entire wiki (and not a tiny one) dedicated to how to make use of it. I suspect that it's not my mother's cup of tea, but for the power-tools geek who wants to make their phone really behave, it looks completely charming.

I've only just started playing with it, but I figure that, for six bucks, it's well worth the money for any one of the dozens of things I can probably use it for. Fabulous little toy...