Too much automation? Ain't no such thing!

As I blogged previously, I have fallen in love with the app Tasker on my Android phone. One day I'll get around to cleaning up my profiles, exporting them and posting them here for the benefit of others, but for now I want to talk about an interesting comment a coworker said to me the other day.

I've been playing around with Tasker's Orientation context. Basically, it's Tasker's interface to the accelerometer. You can trigger events to occur based on what position the phone finds itself in. When I told him about some of the things I'd been playing around with, he responded, "Just so we're clear, there IS such a thing as TOO MUCH automation, you know!"

Sorry, Kevin, I've never seen it.

The experiment started, ironically, as a way to minimize the annoyance of those I work with. Last week I got a text while sitting at my desk. My phone was on the desk next to me, and the volume was set to max. I'm getting old, I keep the volume up most of the time so I can hear it. My coworkers would always comment because the notification tone for SMS on my phone sounds like it should be followed by some ancient wisdom from Mr. Miyagi (for my Android brethren and sistren, it's "Chiff"). I took it onto myself to try to always turn down the volume when at my desk so I didn't disturb the others, but then I thought "why am I doing this all myself!?"

So, I started looking at how I use my Evo and how I could further tailor it to my immediate needs. Solving the problem at the office was easy...I setup a task that says "If the phone is face down, turn all of the volumes (Ringer, Notification and Media) down to '3'." Since getting my first smart phone, I've gotten into the habit of always putting it down face down to protect the screen. The habit's already in place, and now the phone responds to it!

This wasn't a perfect solution off the bat, and did need a little bit of tweaking. For example, if I put my phone down at home, it's usually in the living room. I don't want the volume all the way down in that case so I can actually hear the thing! So, I put in the condition "If you're connected to the home wifi, ignore this task". Done! Now, when I'm at the office and put the phone down, it's quiet, but audible. At home, it's fully up.

Great, but now when I pick up my phone and put it into my pocket, it's quiet again...easily solved. Similar to my habit of putting the phone face down, I always put it into my pocket upside down with the screen against my leg. Again, this protects the screen, but makes it easy for me to hit the power button if I need to (I've found that when the phone's right side up, the power button's a little difficult for me to maneuver my fat fingers into place properly.) Since I have this other habit, I just needed to tap into that. Again, a simple task: "If the phone's upside down, set all volumes to max".

Now, I'm also a dork, so I couldn't leave them to be THAT simple, could I? Tasker also has the ability to use the speech synthesis capabilities built into Android. So, when I put my phone down, it lowers the volumes and then says "Face Down Mode" to confirm that action's happened. Similarly, dropping into the pocket prompts it to say "Walking Mode".

Sorry, ladies, I'm married.

Yes, I consider myself to be VERY lucky my wife married me before she found out what she was in for.

There is one little gotcha, though: Tasker will only check the orientation of the phone if the screen is on. I can't just take my phone out of my pocket and plop it on the table, I do need to hit the power button. But, I used to have to hit the power button, slide, unlock and reset volumes every time I got back to my desk. Fair trade off, I'll take it.

I know, it sounds silly. I also know it sounds "lazy", but if you haven't used something like this you really have no idea how annoying little things like this can be. You deal with them now, but once they're gone and the phone's doing the work, you really start to appreciate how much easier these kinds of little things make your day.