Tasker Day #2: Shake to Toggle Brightness, Automate Screenshot Editing, Monthly Call/Data Monitoring and More!

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The second day of Tasker Week is coming to a close, and we’ve featured a bunch of neat tasks to make your smartphone life much easier. The beauty of Tasker is that it has endless possibilities, with the ability to create a Task for just about anything.

There are many cool features and plenty of functionality we wish our phones had, and depending on your ROM, you might not get them all. Custom ROMs and Xposed add a lot to play with, but Tasker also lets you do surprising amounts of automation, customization and feature-creation without any flashing or system hooks.

Here are today’s featured Tasker scripts, all adding useful and convenient functionality to any Android phone!

Shake your Phone to Increase Brightness: If you dislike Android’s auto-brightness implementation or have turned it off entirely, then this guide will help you set-up Tasker to toggle the brightness whenever you shake your phone. This is helpful for when you’re outside and would rather not reach for the brightness slider (which can be difficult for larger phones while one-handed).

Enable Speakerphone when Phone is Placed on Table: If you’re busy with something and you get a phone call, it might frustrate you having to put your phone down and manually enabling speakerphone in order to actually talk with the person on the other end. However with Tasker, you can easily enable Speakerphone when you’re in a call by placing your phone upright on a flat surface. It works by reading your accelerometer to grab the current orientation of the device. Let’s set it up.

Monitor Monthly Call/Data Usage: If you’re not using an unlimited minutes/data plan, then you might be finding yourself monitoring your usage so you can stop yourself from incurring significant overages on your account. You can use a third-party widget or get notified from your carrier’s app (if such a feature exists) but the disadvantages of these are a) the theming abilities of these widgets are limited or b) your carrier’s app isn’t all that great. Using Tasker, AutoInput, and USSD codes you can easily grab this data and manipulate it however you want.

Read a Random Top Voted Thread from Reddit: I’m sure many users here have heard of or currently use Reddit, the link aggregation website. If you use the website for news, to find funny jokes, to find awesome tips, etc. then you’ll be happy to know that Reddit offers the ability to read data from its subreddits in the form of a JSON feed, and using Tasker we can process this feed to get the data that we want, in this case the titles of each thread. In my setup, I’m taking a random title among the top 3 posts of the day from /r/quotes.

Prompt to Edit Screenshot and Upload to Imgur: If you’re the kind who likes to post screenshots of your device (…like, say, you’re making a picture guide to help people with Tasker tasks ), then you’ll probably find it a bit tedious having to manually open your screenshot in an image editor app, edit it, and then manually uploading the edited file to an image hosting service such as Imgur. If you would like to automate some of these steps, then look no further!

Those are our 5 featured tasks for the day. We’ve listed the tasks in order from easiest to most difficult to implement. If you love Android’s openness, customization, and potential, and if you also like getting your hands dirty, Tasker week is the perfect time of the year to geek out!

Feel free to check out and comment in any of the threads we listed; suggestions and discussion is welcome! If you need Tasker, you can find it on the Play Store. Also, if you know of any nice Task we should feature, drop a comment or send us a PM. Finally, be sure to check out the Tasker Tips & Tricks member-led forum for more awesome Tasker content, by the community for the community!