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Minimal & Elegant Watch Face with Tasker integration [Giveaway]
If you are a Tasker fan and own a smart watch, you are probably aware of AutoWear.
However useful it is, it’s not going to replace your watch face anytime soon. I have been missing a simple way to display some Tasker information directly on my watch face for some time. Fortunately, I came across the Minimal & Elegant (£1.29) watch face on the Play Store.
Forgive me if I’m late to the party on this wonderful watch face. To make up for it, there is also a giveaway attached to this post. I have 20 codes from the developer of this watch face to give to readers. How cool is that?
Minimal & Elegant Watch Face
I have mixed feelings regarding watch faces, especially thanks to seeing those apps that offer hundreds of different watch faces. The amount of choice is simply overwhelming, therefore I uninstalled most of these applications a long time ago. Thankfully, I decided to finally give another watch face a try as I wanted to have some basic Tasker support with my smartwatch. I couldn’t be happier with my decision, as Minimal & Elegant Watch Face had everything I wanted in a watch face – and more.
At first glance, the watch face seems quite complex. I wasn’t sure where to start but as it later turned out, I realized the interface really isn’t that difficult to grasp. The Watch Face – Minimal & Elegant allows you to download a watch face made by a passionate community member, or your chosen designs which you can then customize the functions available in the design of that face. The amount of customization options is enormous considering the fact that you are not making a face from scratch.
Customization of Watch Faces – Minimal & Elegant
Before I jump to the Tasker aspect of things, let me just list some of the options available for you to customize your watch face. Minimal & Elegant watch face application offers you the following options:
- Pre-set Watch Faces
- System
- Digital Time
- Analog Time
- Custom Text Info
- Interactive functions
- Weather
- Steps
- Colors
- Color Scheduler
- Fonts
- Little Worlds
- Magic Backgrounds and Lights
This list is impressive already, without even going to the Tasker setup. Here are some details about each option.
Watch Faces
Duh! You can download/import an already made watch face or export your version and share it with the community. In addition to that, there is a preset schedule, so you can enjoy differently presets at the different time.
System
This section controls the very basic and general behavior of the watch face. You can modify the sleep times, brightness, dim periods and other settings.
Digital Time/Analog Time
If the watch face has a digital/analog version this is where you will find settings regarding the layout. You can display it in a normal or a dim mode and modify the size and position of elements on your watch. You can pick a different way of displaying your time in different modes. There are options to change the color, thickness, and shape of watch hands. Options are plenty to customize the layout and look of your face.
Custom Text
All the text overlays (3 lines) and predefined content can be moved around the face. Since Tasker variables are supported, you can virtually display anything you wish on any part of the watch face.
Interactive Functions
You can set an invisible overlay with various numbers of interactive zones. These can trigger Tasker tasks or predefined android events (opening apps, music playback control, and more). The layout can be customized and a tap can be changed to a double tap to activate as well. Great for placing shortcuts without obscuring the face view.
Weather
Everything you need to set about the weather is here: the source, update rate, units, and layout of the information. If you have already checked the custom text options, the controls will seem very familiar.
Steps
Connecting to Google Fit services allow displaying the step information either from the phone or the smartwatch. Information can be displayed on the screen using Custom Text options.
Colours
All Custom Text colors can be controlled from here. You can predefine the custom colors for different information. You can also set gradients if color backgrounds are used.
Color scheduler
The color scheduler allows you to change the colors of the faces based on the time context. There is no need for 3rd party apps like Tasker. It works on its own.
Fonts
Pretty self-explanatory, you gain access to fine tuning the fonts. Select the custom fonts or modify the shape and thickness of an existing one.
Little Worlds
Oh dear. This is actually very cute. You can have a mini Mario level playing at the bottom of your screen. These animations can be added as a full theme or additions to your existing themes! There are hundreds to pick from. This section alone will invest a lot of your time. Animations vary from a full-color awesomeness to 2-bit NOKIA style add-ons.
Magic Backgrounds and Lights
A great selection of already made watch backgrounds. If you have your own or you don’t want to reinvent the watch face and pick an interesting one, this catalog will help you. There are options to apply watch layouts over pictures and control the lights of the scene.
Minimal & Elegant Watch Face Tasker Integration
Here is a sample Tasker project explaining what you can do with it. For this purpose, I will use my Location Profile, which simply sets a specific value to the %Location variable based on my current location. A great way to control what profiles should run in what locations. The variable’s value will be displayed on the watch face showing the current location. The second profile will change the watch face from one preset to another based on the time context.
Each time I’m connected to a specific WiFi access point, the variable %Location is set, storing the name of this location. Because for now, the Minimal & Elegant Watch Face has no direct global variables support, we have to convert the global variable to a local one. We do this for each location.
A1,A2
These two tasks are only here to help us. When SSID is easy to read, they are not needed, but if you have to type something like VM5875894 it’s handy to have the SSID information available. This will simply put to the clipboard whatever is available under %WIFII.
A3,A7
Each location has its own IF condition entry. The value of %WIFII is read and if it matches the regex of our SSID, then a location is assigned. One option has 2 SSID names assigned, should you need to cover that scenario as well. Rinse and repeat for each location you want to save this way.
A4
A variable %Location is set to [enter your name here]. I could skip this part and go directly to a local variable, but I’m using this value as a condition in other profiles. If I want my profile to work at home but not at work, I will simply add a state context (Variable value: %Location)
A5
We are assigning the value stored in %Location to a local variable – this will make it visible in the Minimal & Elegant plugin. UPDATE: The dev has told me that typing the global variable in, should work as well, even if you can’t pick it out from the list.
A6
Minimal & Elegant allows us to set 6 unique values and display it as a custom text on the watch face (MEV1-MEV6). If you want to update the value of MEV you have to assign a local variable and push it to the watch with the M&E Variables task. If your variable will change the value, but there is no task responsible for pushing it to the watch face, the smartwatch won’t display a new value.
Set Away
The task mimics the way we were displaying the location values on the watch face, but it is triggered when the WiFi is not connected. When this happens, variable %Location is set to “Away“ and pushed to the smartwatch after converting to the local variable.
Change the watch face
The process is simple. Create a few presets and save it in Minimal & Elegant app. Once you have the choice of presets, use task M&E Presets to change the look of your smartwatch.
Intents
The Minimal & Elegant watch face supports intents as well. This means you have several more settings to control using Tasker. While the FAQ page is comprehensive, this can be a very tedious process. Each setting requires a new intent to be built, instead of a nice config action. Have a look here for the list of APIs available for the app.
Import into Tasker
Below, you’ll find the descriptions of each Tasker profile and task used in this project. If you are familiar with how to use Tasker and want to try implementing these yourself, try re-creating these yourself. The process is rewarding, as you’ll gain a deeper understanding of Tasker plug-ins and integration with third-party applications. Plus, you’ll be able to fine-tune my project to your liking.
If on the other hand, you would like to instead download the entire project to import into Tasker, we’ve got the project file for you to do that as well. Simply download it from the below link and save it to your internal storage. Unzip the .prj.xml file, which is Tasker’s format for saving Tasker projects. Open up Tasker and disable Beginner Mode in preferences. Go back to the main screen and long-press on the home icon in the bottom left-hand corner. You should see a pop-up asking you to import a project. Tap on that and find where you saved the project file, and select it to import.
You should now see a new tab in the bottom row with all of the profiles and tasks mentioned in this article. Enjoy your custom, Tasker-integrated watch face!
Download the Minimal & Elegant Tasker Project
Room for Improvement
As with any app, nothing is perfect. Here is my list of suggested improvements:
- All the sliders in the app which are responsible for adjusting the position of elements on the watch face are very sensitive. It’s easy to overshoot the values. I would like to see additional fields to enter the values of X, Y manually as a number.
- The app should support Tasker’s global variables natively. Messing about with additional local variables is clunky.
- I would also welcome more Tasker options. Having intents is great, but very inefficient to use. I understand the API support benefits other app developers, but I would like to see a Tasker config support based on these in the future.
- The color scheduler – I think it goes without mention that this is something that should be driven not only by the time but other, available to Tasker, triggers.
The Minimal & Elegant Watch Face GIVEAWAY
The last part, and most likely the reason that you are reading this in the first place. The Minimal & Elegant watch face giveaway. The developer has kindly offered 20 codes to my readers. I don’t have to sugar coat anything in exchange. All you have to do is keep your eye out on the comments section below as we will be randomly posting codes for anyone to claim. Giveaway is over, thanks everyone for participating!
