A lot of people would have heard about automation apps. Apps which help to, in their crudest sense, simplify various functions of your phone and many would believe, over-simplify your life. Apps like Tasker and Llama have made a great deal of progress since they were initially launched. Both of these apps were able to exploit the hidden strengths of android to a great extent. Being open source, the Android OS enables users the freedom to tweak it and customize it in any way they want, way more than any other mobile OS out there. By combining an insane number of triggers, actions and related parameters, Tasker, and to an extent Llama, have for years now let us Android geeks make our phones our own, in every sense of the word.
Lets face it though: as powerful as Tasker may be, it is quite the devil when it comes to usability. I didnt say Android geeks above in any lesser way; the learning curve with Tasker is known to be pretty high. Scores of users have picked it up like children pick candy in a candy store, and then let go of it because they found it too bitter for their taste. Over time apps like Llama have taken care of those users- simplifying some things while removing the tougher bits. Along with these two apps, the play store is rife with many others, each trying to offer the user some sort of advancement over the other. Apps like Actions Pro, Chronos ad Locale being a few of them.
So the question is, amongst all this glut, is there really a need for another automation app? Well, Weebo would beg to differ. Sure, having too many choices is never a really bad thing, but also, what does it offer over the others which should make you, the user, take up this app over all the others? In this series of posts, this being the first one, I would take our readers through some of the capabilities of this particular app, developed in-house. In future posts, I will elaborate more on particular functions and what we can expect in the future.
THE HOME SCREEN
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The Home screen, as you can see in the above screenshots, is essentially a list of all the rules available in your app. It includes all the rules created by you, as well as (if any) pre-made ones. Toggling the context key will bring up the sub menu, which gives you two options Add location and Weebo App settings. Also, an automation app is nothing without the rules one creates, and as time goes and you become more comfortable with the said app, the number of rules also tend to increase. Therefore, we decided to add a an advanced selection of any rules that might be stored on your phone by their general category. By easily clicking on the (by default) All, you can therefore find out rules based on location, battery, utilities etc simply by changing the category. Simple and easy!
Also, to select a particular rule to activate it, all you need to do is click on it. The default colour changes to dark yellow for that particular rule, providing a visual indicator. Also, if you look closely at the screenshot below, you will see a tiny edit button alongside the selected rule. Clicking that button will enable you to directly make changes to the rule, in XML format, but more about that later.
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ADD RULES
On swiping towards your left, you are greeted by the Add Rules page. Designed for most power users, it enables you to add your own rules, letting your creativity a free reign. Of course, a downside to it would be that most people dont know XML coding or are not very savvy with it. Unfortunately, as of now, we dont really have any workarounds, but yes, its being looked into.
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Now a little about the XML page by itself. As I said earlier, in the screenshots here you can see how easy it is to add your rules. At the bottom, you get four options, update, cancel, create new and delete. I presume most of these actions are self explanatory. All in all, this is a very simple, but incredibly powerful tool. In time, we are looking to streamline this functionality in order to encourage a more expressive utilization of these rules.
LOCATIONS
The core of weebos functionality comes from the inherent use of location tracking, utilizing cellular towers around you to triangulate your location with better accuracy. To that extent, we have enabled the user with adding as many locations that he would want.
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From the screenshots above, you can see that two locations are already present, Home and Work. by clicking on start tracking when you are at home or at work, you get the option of choosing the amount of time you would want to be tracked, which stretches from 5 minutes to 8 hours. When tracking for the stipulated time, the app is able to triangulate your position to an accurate degree, and save it for its own future reference. Once added, this can easily be used to set up rules such as switch on Wi-Fi when I get to Office or Switch on Ringer when I get to home. This is just a small example of how useful this location tracking feature could be, once properly used. You can also, at anytime you want, edit, delete or reset a particular locations cell IDs if you think it needs better accuracy.
RECENT EVENTS
The final tab you can access by scrolling to your left is the Recent Tab. It shows all the functions and rules that you might have used recently, and allows you to search through your most used rules easily.
Follow this link to create your own rules - Link
Weebo apk (Push it as system app) - Link
- Team AvatarROM
Lets face it though: as powerful as Tasker may be, it is quite the devil when it comes to usability. I didnt say Android geeks above in any lesser way; the learning curve with Tasker is known to be pretty high. Scores of users have picked it up like children pick candy in a candy store, and then let go of it because they found it too bitter for their taste. Over time apps like Llama have taken care of those users- simplifying some things while removing the tougher bits. Along with these two apps, the play store is rife with many others, each trying to offer the user some sort of advancement over the other. Apps like Actions Pro, Chronos ad Locale being a few of them.
So the question is, amongst all this glut, is there really a need for another automation app? Well, Weebo would beg to differ. Sure, having too many choices is never a really bad thing, but also, what does it offer over the others which should make you, the user, take up this app over all the others? In this series of posts, this being the first one, I would take our readers through some of the capabilities of this particular app, developed in-house. In future posts, I will elaborate more on particular functions and what we can expect in the future.
THE HOME SCREEN
The Home screen, as you can see in the above screenshots, is essentially a list of all the rules available in your app. It includes all the rules created by you, as well as (if any) pre-made ones. Toggling the context key will bring up the sub menu, which gives you two options Add location and Weebo App settings. Also, an automation app is nothing without the rules one creates, and as time goes and you become more comfortable with the said app, the number of rules also tend to increase. Therefore, we decided to add a an advanced selection of any rules that might be stored on your phone by their general category. By easily clicking on the (by default) All, you can therefore find out rules based on location, battery, utilities etc simply by changing the category. Simple and easy!
Also, to select a particular rule to activate it, all you need to do is click on it. The default colour changes to dark yellow for that particular rule, providing a visual indicator. Also, if you look closely at the screenshot below, you will see a tiny edit button alongside the selected rule. Clicking that button will enable you to directly make changes to the rule, in XML format, but more about that later.
ADD RULES
On swiping towards your left, you are greeted by the Add Rules page. Designed for most power users, it enables you to add your own rules, letting your creativity a free reign. Of course, a downside to it would be that most people dont know XML coding or are not very savvy with it. Unfortunately, as of now, we dont really have any workarounds, but yes, its being looked into.
Now a little about the XML page by itself. As I said earlier, in the screenshots here you can see how easy it is to add your rules. At the bottom, you get four options, update, cancel, create new and delete. I presume most of these actions are self explanatory. All in all, this is a very simple, but incredibly powerful tool. In time, we are looking to streamline this functionality in order to encourage a more expressive utilization of these rules.
LOCATIONS
The core of weebos functionality comes from the inherent use of location tracking, utilizing cellular towers around you to triangulate your location with better accuracy. To that extent, we have enabled the user with adding as many locations that he would want.
From the screenshots above, you can see that two locations are already present, Home and Work. by clicking on start tracking when you are at home or at work, you get the option of choosing the amount of time you would want to be tracked, which stretches from 5 minutes to 8 hours. When tracking for the stipulated time, the app is able to triangulate your position to an accurate degree, and save it for its own future reference. Once added, this can easily be used to set up rules such as switch on Wi-Fi when I get to Office or Switch on Ringer when I get to home. This is just a small example of how useful this location tracking feature could be, once properly used. You can also, at anytime you want, edit, delete or reset a particular locations cell IDs if you think it needs better accuracy.
RECENT EVENTS
The final tab you can access by scrolling to your left is the Recent Tab. It shows all the functions and rules that you might have used recently, and allows you to search through your most used rules easily.
Follow this link to create your own rules - Link
Weebo apk (Push it as system app) - Link
- Team AvatarROM