As we get into part three of the Tasker introduction we’re going to talk about Tasks. Tasks are just as they sound, a task that is performed by the application.
I never understood why Tasker called trigger events ‘Profiles’ but I’m sure there is some underlying reasoning behind it. They actually named the tasks what they are, a Task, and this is something that Tasker performs when a Profile is triggered. There are dozens and dozens of different Tasks that can be selected and you might not even truly understand what each of them do just from reading through. Some are better learned by trial and error while others are better learned by doing a little research and finding a Profile that uses that task.
Tasks categories like App, Alerts and Display are fairly easy to understand. However, once you start getting into tasks like Variables, Plugin and 3rd Party, these aren’t the easiest things in the world to figure out.
Each of these categories has their own set of tasks assigned to them. For instance, there’s 19 different Alert tasks and 14 different Display tasks. Again, it will probably be a little overwhelming when you first start digging through this application so try to take it step by step. This was the whole reason why I wanted to break these introductory articles down because the application is much easier to grasp this way.
When you first launch the application you are shown the Profiles tab by default but you can simply swipe over the Task tab and look at your blank slate. At the bottom you will see a Plus sign and when you tap on this you will be asked to give your brand new Task a name. This can be any name you want, but you should name it something that is easy for you to understand what it is. In the first image of this article, you can see that I created a Task and named it Brightness. Even this is a little vague, but it is enough for me to figure out what it is and that is what matters. Once you give you new Task a name, you’ll be shown a blank Task page as you see above.
From here, you will want to tap the Plus sign at the bottom of the screen again and this will bring up all of the categories that are available in Tasker right now. As of writing this guide, there are 21 different categories and each of them includes their own unique Tasks. Some of these have a few dozen tasks so again, try not to let it get to overwhelming and just take it one category at a time. We have categories for Alerts, Apps, Audio, Code, Display, File, Image, Input, Location, Media, Net, Phone, Plugin, Scene, Settings, System, Task, Tasker, Variables, Zoom and 3rd Party. Let’s take a look inside each of these categories and see what type of tasks are possible.
As I said, there are a lot of Tasks to look through so just take your time and go through each of them. When we look into the Alert Tasks, we can set things like a regular beep, a flash, morse code, LED notification, a vibrate, a dialog box and much, much more. For Apps we have things like launching an app, closing an app and inserting data into the calendar. When we look at the Display category we have things like going into car mode, setting a wallpaper, going into night mode, autorotating the screen, changing the brightness and more. As you can see, the possibilities are virtually endless and you have way, way more things to choose from in Tasker than you did in MacroDroid.
There is a lot to take in here and I was going to go over an example task/profile but I think I’ll save that for tomorrow. Go through all of these Tasks and let me know if you have any questions about them. I certainly won’t be able to telling you every single one of them does because even I am not that advanced in Tasker yet, but I am more than eager to figure something out if someone is curious.
