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If you need to automate something on your Android phone, you can be confident Tasker can handle it. While the app has always been good with updates, the new management, aka joaomgcd of AutoApps fame, has pushed some significant new functionality over the past year. Last month, the Tasker v5.9 beta added an interesting new feature — the ability to read the phone's Logcat and react to events, opening up a whole new category of reactive use-cases for your tasks. Today, the stable build of v5.9 was pushed to the Play Store with Logcat events and a whole bunch of other features.
Automation mega-app Tasker has a new update out, and it's a big one. The app, which recently changed hands, is now on v5.7, bringing new NFC, keyboard, and nav bar actions, amongst other things.
Powerful Android automation app Tasker changed hands to joaomgcd in the summer, and it continues to go from strength to strength. The latest release takes it up to version 5.5, and there are a host of additions including better import/export functionality, Google Drive integration, and custom setting monitoring.
Joaomgcd (Joao Dias) is responsible for some of Android's most interesting apps, and one of those is Join. It gives you convenient remote access to the notifications, files, and clipboard on your Android device while you're using another system (and vice versa), and there are a lot of even deeper integrations besides. A major new update to version 2.0 has just been announced, making Join more useful than ever.
Joaomgcd's AutoVoice app is one of the most powerful tools you can try on Android for customizing your Google Assistant commands, especially when used in conjunction with Tasker (which he recently acquired as well). Most recently, the app added Google Assistant integration with v3.0, and now v3.5 is kicking that up a notch by letting you customize what you can ask Assistant and what it answers back.
For years, Tasker has been one of the best power-user apps available for Android, with the ability to automate (or create shortcuts for) a vast number of actions. Dozens of third-party plugins are also available for Tasker, further expanding its functionality. But after eight years of development, Crafty Apps EU has now transferred ownership of the application to joaomgcd, a major Android developer known for Join and AutoApps.
Joao from joaomgcd, better known for his series of "Auto-" apps and Join, is one of our favorite tinkering developers. He always manages to find a way to make Android do things it's not supposed to, and the latest "hack" he has come up with is a new "Read" button on Gmail notifications. You know how you sometimes receive emails with a few words that are easily legible from the notification without having to open the entire Gmail app, or how you get automated emails which content you already know without opening them, and you just want a quick way to mark them as read without deleting or archiving them? This is what the button does.
Late last year we saw the introduction of a useful little app called AutoTools, dubbed 'Tasker Plus" by its developer, Joaomgcd. The AutoTools plugin adds to Tasker's already large feature set, with the ability to change certain system settings and control different toggles. João has been busy working on an upgrade, and now version 2.0 is upon us, which includes web screens, a navigation drawer, and HTML reading capabilities.
Google launched Assistant last year in Allo, and then it came to the Pixel and Google Home. The period of exclusivity for Google is over now with Assistant on tons of Android devices, and there's even an API for developers to implement on just about anything. Case in point, there is now a version of the AutoVoice Chrome extension that can call upon the power of Assistant. However, the setup process is quite a slog.
João Dias, better known online by his handle Joaomgcd, is one of the most prolific indie developers around. In addition to his work on a smorgasbord of Tasker plugins, he's also released Join, a Pushbullet alternative that allows sending commands to your phone via a Chrome extension on a nearby PC. The latest update to the extension adds voice control, so users can "push" links to Android or perform other tasks with a Star Trek-style voice command. It even uses "Computer" as the prompt - classy.
You can do a lot of stuff with Tasker - the possibilities are almost endless. Because they were almost endless, developer joaomgcd has gone and filled in the gaps, creating AutoTools, a new Tasker plugin. Joao calls this 'Tasker Plus,' namely because it can do everything Tasker cannot do.
Join is a pretty cool app. It can do a variety of things, from sending texts to transferring files across your variety of different devices. Developer joaomgcd has added another feature to its extensive arsenal, making it easy to record an Android phone or tablet's screen from another device.
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João Dias — better known to the world as joaomgcd — has just announced the beta version of a new Tasker plugin called the AutoArduino. The AutoArduino is just the latest in a series of over a dozen apps from the developer, and it lets owners of the programmable circuit board use Tasker to control any one of its countless digital and analog pins with nothing more than an Android phone or tablet.
Joaomgcd hates touching his phone. At least that's what I think the drive behind all of these apps he keeps developing and improving is. He's truly the man who wants to make automation as attainable of a goal as possible, and to that extent, he has built apps like AutoNotification and AutoInput that allow you to create plenty of new actions that the famous Tasker app can make use of in its automation profiles.
We're big fans of cross-device sync here at Android Police. Therefore, we're of the opinion that if you haven't yet heard of joaomgcd's latest app, you're missing out. Join is a bit like Pushbullet, in that it can do Android-to-desktop notifications, desktop SMS, and a cross-device clipboard. But it can do a lot more; for example, you can set your Android wallpaper through Chrome simply by right-clicking on an image of your choice and selecting "Set image as wallpaper."
Join, by joaomgcd of many Tasker plugins and automation apps fame, has been in beta for nearly two months now. When I tried it out at launch, it already had a lot of its functionality covered, allowing your phones and computers to share things with each other: links, SMS messages, screenshots, media files, copied text, and more. The app has been getting frequent updates since then, adding Tasker integration and making it possible to send SMS from any browser without the need for a Chrome extension. You could say that Pushbullet's little brother has grown up to actually compete against it.
Tinkering takes many forms on Android, and you don't need to root your device or flash a custom ROM to get your hands dirty. Installing one of developer joaomgcd's Tasker plugins will provide plenty of ways to customize your software experience in very particular ways. Want a notification with a gazillion buttons that save you from having to open up different apps? You now have that option with the latest version of AutoNotification.
João Dias, also known as joaomgcd on the Play Store, is one of those developers who are never, ever, content with the current capabilities of modern smartphones. He wants them to be more powerful, respond to more commands, allow more interactions, all from more interfaces. His AutoVoice app has been available for a while, allowing you to harness the OK Google interaction scheme to automate plenty of new actions and issue commands that Google's default algorithms don't yet understand.
Windows 10 marks the official debut of Cortana on the desktop, and already a developer has integrated the voice assistant with Android devices. Mass producer of Tasker plugins João Dias, known as joaomgcd in the Play Store, has published this video showing Cortana playing along with AutoRemote and AutoVoice to control room lights and disable phone notifications.
If you want to do absolutely everything from the "OK Google" voice prompt in Android... well, you can't. You can't, say, fire a rocket at the moon, or end world hunger, or have a dachshund puppy delivered to your doorstep. But developer João Dias is trying his darnedest to make all of that happen, and with the latest update to his AutoRemote app, it's getting closer and closer. You might even be able to make that rocket thing happen if you know someone at NASA.