Yesterday, on March 13, Crafty Apps EU revealed that its popular and powerful automation application Tasker has a fairly big update in the works that should be coming soon. Although the overhaul has not been given a timeframe as of this writing, the devs have released a log showing what they have been working on. The changelog not only provides some interesting improvements for the application but is also just a great way for the devs to let everybody know that their feedback has not gone unheard – and won’t remain unanswered.
The vast majority of improvements in the upcoming Tasker update apply to devices running Android version 4.0 and up. Among those are new features, new task management tools, and a wealth of bug fixes. To start with, the developer has incorporated design changes based on Google’s increasingly popular Material Design standards. The old layout will still be an available option for those who aren’t into the Material design, but the devs have also added: around “900 material design icons and selectable colors.” Also added in the future release are twelve new tasks, including nine new actions, two Android settings tweaks, scene element switch, and new launcher shortcuts and widgets. The update incorporates eight pretty substantial bug fixes as well. Previous versions of the application suffered a problem with the Input/Back Button action sending the user to the home screen instead of actually instantiating a “back button click.”
That will be solved in the future update, as well as two root-related complications – one associated with Wifi Tether requiring WRITE_SETTINGS permission and the other where Airplane Mode was causing a “spurious” error on rooted devices. Also fixed in the according to the changelog, file actions will no longer add standard file extensions automatically to the target name. The action “JavaScript(let)” has had its function selector improved as well, and will no longer show the incorrect type for the 3rd parameter of elemVisibility. Additionally, crashes on exit from the scene editor – while the currently referenced task was on SD – will no longer occur. Finally, the problem of fonts not being exported in app creation text elements should no longer occur and lock/unlock functions should now display correctly. Devices running earlier versions of Android – from 1.6 and up – will also see some bug fixes when the update finally goes live. First, the Take Picture action has previously had issues with auto-focus not happening even when the camera parameters had specified it. That should no longer occur after the update and neither should the prior trouble with local variables pertaining to the Text or Label field not replacing correctly in scene elements. There are many other changes expected in the next Tasker update as well, with many more adjustments likely to be made before it is finally released.