AndroidApps

Quick Tasker tip: Set your alarm with Tasker to avoid unnecessary button pressing [Video]

Screenshot_2013-06-26-04-43-41Alarm clock apps have become fairly sophisticated, giving you all sorts of options for smooth wake ups, volume, snooze features, work days, and so on. The problem with this is that the result is often that just setting a quick alarm suddenly becomes a more complicated task than it should, as it presents you with a ton of options when you just want it to make a sound at a given time. That’s why I’ve stopped setting my alarms in the alarm app, and instead do it with Tasker.

For this to even be an option, you need an alarm clock app that actually works with Tasker’s Set Alarm action. You’ll basically just have to see if yours works, or you can use the one I do, Alarm Clock Plus. I like Alarm Clock Plus because it allows you to configure some settings for default alarms, meaning that when you use Tasker’s Set Alarm, an alarm will be created using those settings but the time specified in Tasker.

The Set Alarm action requires two fields to be filled in, Hours and Minutes. These fields can be variables, which means that you can use whatever method you want to actually populate them. Voice control, AutoRemote, or text input is just a few examples. I personally have a shortcut in my sidebar UI that allows me to set three sequential alarms based off a single alarm time that I input using the Variable Query action. You can see the difference in the video below:

Setting aside the sequential alarm part of my setup, the rest is actually fairly simple. First it just does a Variable Query, with Input Type set to Numeric/Decimal. I use a period as a separator for the hours and minutes, so that I always input time as e.g. 06.00. I then just need to split the variable created by the Variable Query by the period, and put the two resulting variables into their respective fields in the Get Voice action, feeding it hours and minutes. It’s a task that requires a grand total of three actions (Variable Query, Variable Split, and Set Alarm), and I find it to be a lot quicker and more intuitive than the alarm clock app’s method of setting alarms.

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Andreas Ødegård

Andreas Ødegård is more interested in aftermarket (and user created) software and hardware than chasing the latest gadgets. His day job as a teacher keeps him interested in education tech and takes up most of his time.

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