On
a scale of one to ten, how smart is your smartphone, really? It may be
smart enough to handle email, or help you navigate unfamiliar urban
landscapes. But is it smart enough to turn off the GPS when you plug it
back in at home? Or does it have the brains to turn
on the ringer once you’ve left work?
Some of the old Android pros in the audience may be thinking right about now “hey, that sounds an awful lot like what
Tasker for Android can do”. And you know what, you’d be right to think that. But here at MakeUseOf, we only write about
free applications and tools… and this is where
Llama for Android comes in.
If you already know Tasker, you can think of Llama as its free
cousin, with a quirkier personality, who’s easier to get along with, and
is a tad less brainy. If you don’t know Tasker, you can think of Llama
as the most powerful customization software for your phone money can’t
buy.
After installing Llama and running it for the first time, you’ll be greeted with this extensive help text:
This is one developer who’s obviously expecting people to read their
help. If you’ve never used customization software before, do resist the
urge to tap the “
Okey doke!” button and
read these prompts. You won’t regret it.
Immediately after tapping “
Okay doke!”, you’re greeted with yet another peppy help message:
Locations are an integral part of Llama’s life, and yet it manages to
do without using GPS or WiFi (at least by default). It works by
checking to see what signal masts (“cells”) your phone is talking to.
That’s brilliant because it doesn’t take up any additional battery power
and provides a fairly reliable location signal, especially in a dense
urban jungle. Eager to get started, I quickly tapped “
Groovy” and then tapped the first entry on the list, which said “
Home“:
Oops… What’s that now? You see what I mean about reading those help prompts? It clearly says above, “
Long-tap the area for your current location“. Okay, long-tap it is:
Ah, that’s much better. I then chose “
Start Learning Area“, to help Llama find out and remember what cells it finds around my home. It then asked me the next obvious question:
I had a while before I next needed to pop out, so I told Llama I’m
going to be around for at least 30 minutes (I had to scroll the list for
that). It then returned me to the Areas list:
If I had reception for more than one cell in my home, I could now
take my phone for a quick trip around my mansion and have it detect all
available cells. They would all automatically go into the Home location,
helping Llama pinpoint it that much better in the future. As it was, I
was content to keep touring the interface. I decided to take a look at
the settings:
Here too, the author’s preference for longer help texts shows. Each
setting is painstakingly detailed right in the menu, making a separate
manual less necessary, and Llama easier to get along with. There was a
button entitle “
Experimental Stuff” with help text that said “
Here be dragons“. Naturally, I just had to tap it:
So here we discover Llama has additional location modes, for the
curious and those living in areas where cellular masts are few and far
between. You can use a GPS, use WiFi (i.e, check to see if you’re near
certain networks), and even periodically check for Bluetooth devices.
All settings were marked EXTREMELY EXPERIMENTAL (all-caps courtesy of
the author), and seeing as how I live in a very cell-dense area, I saw
no need to try them out. I guess I wasn’t feeling that risqué after all.
Onwards!
Llama’s main building blocks are “
events” and “
profiles“. Let’s start by looking at events first. An event is made up of “
conditions” and “
actions“.
To cut out the jargon, a simple example would be that you pair the
phone with your Bluetooth earpiece (condition) and it switches to Silent
Mode (actions).
Now let’s look at what some of these conditions may be:
As you can see, there are quite a few. Help is just a tap away, for
each of them. This is one thoroughly documented app, in case you haven’t
noticed. Calendar Event is a pretty interesting condition:
So if you mark your meetings with the word “
meeting”
(“project meeting” etc), you could use Llama to have your phone switch
to silent just as soon as a meeting starts. You can also have more than
one condition per event:
Here, the event would execute only if I’m in a scheduled meeting between 9:00am and 5:00pm. Now let’s add an action:
We’ve added an action to change the Profile into Quiet when this
event happens. In simple terms, it means my phone will automatically
switch to silent when I go into a meeting, but
only if that meeting happens sometime between 9am and 5pm. So late meetings might just get interrupted… too bad, right?
But what’s this “
Profile” thing, and where did it come from? Well, I’m glad you asked:
You can think of a profile as a “set of settings”. If you’ve ever had
a Nokia phone before, the concept would be instantly recognizable.
Let’s take a quick look at some of what you can find in a profile:
Ringtone volume, notification volume, vibration, the specific
ringtone and/or notification tone for that profile, the media volume,
alarm volume, and any other type of volume or sound your phone can
possibly make. In short, profiles provide you with granular control over
your phone’s speaker. So, for example, you can have a profile that only
rings, softly, but doesn’t make any sound when you get an SMS or an
email/chat message.
Last but not least, let’s look at the
Recent tab:
This is a history of the cellular masts your phone recently used. As
you can see, I’ve used a cell other than my default home one. I could
add it to an existing area or use it to create a new area. This is handy
because it lets me teach Llama about locations after the fact, in case I
didn’t have time to train it while I was at the office (for example).
Bottom Line
If you’ve made it all the way here, then you already know how awesome
Llama is. But in case you just skimmed the article, let me spell it out
for you: Llama is an
amazing piece of software for
your phone, and gives Tasker a real run for its money. It’s free,
friendly, playful and powerful. If you don’t own Tasker but always
wanted to automate your phone, get
Llama right now.
When it comes to device automation, there’s just one 900-lb gorilla in the Android space, and that’s 
