Guides for Android & Android Wear

I used to get by at the gym with my trusty smart phone in my pocket, streaming my workout play list while I exercised. Now that my daily driver is a Nexus 6, keeping my phone in loose workout clothing simply doesn't cut it as a comfortable or safe option. Enter Android Wear. Why is an Android Watch my perfect solution for workout media? It's easy:

Google Play Music. I've got all of my workout music pinned to my phone, allowing me to also download this play list to my watch. Any music I would listen to on my phone is now available in the much smaller and portable watch form factor.

Fitness tracking. My watch tracks all my steps (the accuracy of which is questionable), which will sync up to the Google Fit database the next time it is connected to my phone. There's also a really interesting application for Android Wear that I'm currently testing that utilizes the phone accelerometer to track both exercises and reps as your perform them.

WiFi Connection. This new feature in Android Wear 5.1.1 has now made my dreams for Android Wear reality. I can leave my phone at home, see all notification activity, and even respond to high priority emails or texts if need be. 

Let’s face it: the current process for transferring your offline music from Google Music is a pain. And not just because it’s cumbersome -- half the time it just doesn’t seem to do anything. Between countless watch resets and new android wear watches, here’s what I’ve come to learn: do not resync all of your apps to your watch or perform a factory reset. These will never be the fastest nor the easiest options for initiating the transfer process -- resending all the data from your phone to your watch will be a big drain on battery life, performance, and your time. The three things I recommend are:

1. Uncheck and recheck the ‘Download to Android Wear’ selection within Play Music. 

2. Disable bluetooth on your phone, re-start your watch, and re-pair. 

3. Place your watch on a charger and leave it within range of your phone. 

Two days ago, Motorola confirmed that the next update for Android Wear will bring WiFi support for the Moto 360, putting to rest the debate as to whether or not one of the pioneer’s of Android Wear would be capable of supporting such a feature. Now that Moto is officially supporting this additional connectivity option, it’s time to take a second look at potential use cases for our beloved timepiece. Why is WiFi so important for Android Wear? Who would ever use it? 

The biggest utility the update will have specifically for me is keeping me connected during fitness activity. I work out at a gym with an open WiFi connection, meaning I can have my watch automatically connect to the network, giving me real time notifications as they come to my phone without having to work out with my phone. My daily driver is a Nexus 6, and one of the biggest selling points of Android Wear for me was the ability to offload my workout playlist to the watch so I could still listen to my Google Play Music library with bluetooth headphones, sparing the need for my phone. I still liked to have my phone close by though — if I was called to work, if my workout partner was finished and couldn’t find me, etc. were all reasons to still require me to check my phone even if it was out of range of my watch. With the option of WiFi connectivity, I can simply leave my phone at home and still receive those important notifications and respond if necessary. 

There are a few other cool uses I can think of that may make this a killer feature for Android enthusiasts. IT professionals can potentially test WiFi strength from their wrist. Home automation could be a huge area for expanding this feature’s capability, especially if the Nest can support direction connection to your watch. 

If there's one thing that rings true for all Android Wear devices, it's that the modified OS they are running is very notably in its infancy. It's exciting to be on the forefront of new mobile technology, but being an early adopter naturally carries the assumption that there will be bugs aplenty. And, in some cases, weird workarounds to solve your problems. 

Such is the case with the Moto 360. One of the first things I wanted to know after spending a day with this watch was: how the hell do I turn the screen off when it's charging? I don't want this sucker running hot on the charger leaving the back open to cracking after experiencing extreme temperature change during the winter. There didn't seem to be an obvious answer in any of the settings. I tinkered around and stumbled upon this workaround: 

1. After charging your Moto 360, pull open the Android Wear app and check the checkbox for Ambient Mode (re-check if you have it checked). 

2. Let the watch screen dim to the darkest setting. 

3. Uncheck the Ambient Screen option. 

The watch will now spend a few seconds before dimming again, and then finally turn completely off. Phew!

EDIT: The developer of Reddit Sync has now implemented an auto day / night theme feature. I will leave this guide up in case it helps anyone learn the basics of AutoInput, just know there is a much easier autotheming option now!

Newly released tasker plugin AutoInput (http://joaoapps.com/autoinput) allows you to automate your apps in mind-blowingly complex and interesting ways. In this post I will focus on a simple use-case that takes advantage of the app's ability to emulate screen touches.

I was eager to put this plugin to use, so I thought of one “nice to have” profile that would solve a frustration I've had with my favorite Reddit app, Reddit Sync. Reddit Sync is great for doing everything Reddit, and it even has the option to switch between day and night themes. My only gripe about this (first world problems, I know) was that there was no native support for scheduling the theme to be switched between Night and Day mode.

I'll preface this by saying there are a thousand ways you can set up the day / night trigger so let your imagination run wild. My solution isn't the most elegant but it works. It's just one example that is meant to give you an idea of how you can automate switching themes for Reddit Sync. Your designated night / day usage are obviously going to differ from mine so you'll want to change those if you decide to use the same trigger configuration.

You can grab the XML to import this profile into Tasker here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CbdA2PCF8_HCjNYus-Pwy5Njne4RaoJuhQURZ4D8P3s/edit?usp=sharing

Warning: Tasker jargon ahead. If you aren't familiar with Tasker this guide may not be all that helpful.

Here is the list of profiles I use to accomplish the theme automation:

The Reddit Sync Theme Task you see above is a profile that is triggered when Reddit Sync is launched. But we don’t want this theme control to happen every single time you open the profile, so we’re going to create a switch mechanism that will turn this profile on, run the AutoInput task, then turn itself off. This will happen two times throughout the day, during the day and at night. Obviously, my day switch is 6:30 AM and my night switch is 12:30 AM, so I’m telling Reddit Sync that the first time it should run after those times have passed it should run my Auto Input profile once and then turn itself off. So the purpose of the two profiles below is simply to switch a variable value to 1, which tells the variable value profile to turn on the Reddit Sync Task profile and have it run with Reddit Sync is open. Below are the tasks contained in my AutoInput task, triggered as a result of the Reddit Sync Task profile (opening Reddit Sync):

This should give you a good idea of how this Profile is self terminating and makes for a clean switch mechanism when combined with the day / night profiles. So how do you get the AutoInput parts of this task setup? Luckily, the developer of AutoInput made this very easy for us. When you go to setup your task, find the Plugin section. I used the ‘AutoInput Action’ for all 4 AutoInputs.

When you select AutoInput action, you’ll have a few choices as seen below:

Here we want ‘Easy Setup’ this will prompt a notification in the notification shade with instructions telling you to select your app, press ‘Add’ in the notification shade, and then select the element within your App you want to be selected by AutoInput.

Were going to utilize this Selecting Field capability for the touch automation. Open Reddit Sync and select ‘Front Page’. This tells AutoInput that the Front Page element is the element you want to interact with. Once selected, the notification message will change and let you view the details of the element you selected. What you want to do is hit ‘Accept’ at the bottom of the notification. You are then prompted to navigate back to Tasker in the recent items menu, so pull up Tasker and fill in the rest of the Configuration details. All you need is the Type set to Text, Value set to frontpage, and the Action set to Click. Below is a reference for what the completed Action list will look like.

Rinse and repeat this step to get your other Actions. So you will make an Action to click Settings after the Frontpage, then click the Night Mode. From there you can hit Settings at the top left to navigate back to the Frontpage. To get an idea for the Values I used reference the Task Edit screenshot I posted earlier.