You have probably come across the news about new Tasker 5.0 coming out soon. There is also a feature release that is circulating. I’d like to address some of the features here as the post I have read so far are limited to naming the features only.
Highlights of Tasker 5.0
- switched themes to Material Design (Something I would welcome, I think a bit of appeal could attract other users. I mentioned this before in my initial release article)
- added Tasker (default) theme at Prefs / UI / Theme (The hardened fans of the default user interface will be pleased, this means you don’t have to change the way Tasker looks)
- added approx 900 material design icons, selectable colours (You probably know that I’m an advocate for the Material Design Icons app, and this implementation will make it so much easier to add some style to your creations, I really hope that search by name will be included, something that is missing in the MDI app and we get to export icons in various colours. Does it mean that Tasker will get a native color picker? I’m not sure.)
Added features for Tasker 5.0
- action Set App Shortcuts, for Tasker or apps created by Tasker (Am I reading this correctly? handling the shortcuts and their placement? That is not right.. otherwise we could have different home screens for different triggers)
- action Take Screenshot (Something that has been missing for a while, I wonder if we get an option to wake up the screen)
- action Set Alarm: parameters Ringtone and Vibrate (I’m surprised this has been not available for so long. Writing a custom alarm in Tasker is not a hard task really but finally, you just get to use the integrated alarm app instead of going through apps like AlarmPad)
- action Show Alarms: (This should come with the local array, so alarms should be labeled and actioned later if needed)
- action Cancel Alarm: (As above, Google Assistant already have the options to canceled the alarms if set by the default app )
- Menu / More / Android Settings / Write Settings (Remember the run shell article? Yes these are the settings that Tasker get to toggle now natively while making my article useless, I welcome the change)
- Menu / More / Android Settings / Draw Over Other Apps (I guess it guides the behaviors of popups and notifications, like when you are watching the YouTube and you get these annoying messages from your mom)
- launcher shortcuts: now support all icon types (This means that your icon in the status bar is no longer limited to the boring selection of Android icons)
- launcher widgets: don’t show ‘no image’ option in icon select, it’s required (wait, what?)
- action Test File: test file existence (something that was previously available through the run shell action, now saves you trouble. I wonder if the file exists do we get some information about the file, like size, type, meta)
- scene element Switch (Do they mean toggle? )
- action Settings / Notification Listener Settings (some additional settings that were previously available through the run shell will have corresponding Tasker actions. This means that unlike the shell actions these actions may have better success rate across all devices)
- action Settings / Print Settings (whatever, I’m not interested )
- action Test Net, option Paired Bluetooth Devices (I have stopped handling the no- internet exception in my Tasker projects as it’s too much hassle for what it’s worth I just ignore Tasker Errors most of the time. Having the option to check if the internet is present in a single action is nice. I’m expecting a local variable to go with it. Querying the BT devices is also good addition but I have been using some plugins for that)
There you have it, folks! My thoughts on the changes. We will have to wait a few more weeks before this version of Tasker is available. The next update is a beta release and it will last few more weeks to collect the bugs before (hopefully final) release. It’s nice to see the app progressing. I hope to see more and more coming. I’m sure I gonna try it out in my new tutorials.
