The Android Scripting Environment is to the Android phone as Greasemonkey is to Firefox.   It’s a simple place to do quick hacks for your phone without having to build a full plugin or application.

Two cool scripts that just got released are Silent Night and Droid Track.

Silent Night is sort of like the awesome “Shutup.lua”  – both of them silence your phone.  Shutup.lua turns your ringer off when you put your phone face down ¹ . Turn it face up when you want to get calls again.  Silent Night turns the ringer off for you while you sleep ².  Back when Locale was free ³ I had a rule set up to do just that.  Now Silent Night can solve that problem.  You just set that script to run as a service.

Droid Track is interesting for a different reason.  It reads your location every few minutes and logs it for you – cool if you are doing a hike and want to show where you’ve been.  I’ve got the Google “Tracks” application, but I’ve never used it.  Droid Track is similar, but will write your tracks to a file or you can post them to a web server or what not.  That keeps your info off the Google servers and helps you stay autonomous, especially if you are trying to stay in your own cloud.

It seems every time I go back to the list of ASE  scripts more and more are added  ⁴ .  This is why sometimes easy is more important than perfect.  The ASE doesn’t implement everything that an Android phone can do ⁵ but it makes it so easy to get going that anyone can knock out something useful.

If you’ve got an Android phone, you should definitely check it out.

1. How cool is that?  So rather than pushing buttons or navigating through menus, you turn it face down, like a baby you want to smother because it just keeps crying and crying and it won’t ever stop and you can’t sleep all you want to do is sleep.    (back)
2. Sort of like unplugging the baby monitor when you need a night’s sleep.   I’m not sure why my analogies all involve injuring babies, I bear them no ill will and in fact I’ve heard that they are quite delicious pleasant!   (back)
3. I keep meaning to update my Google checkout account because that’s an app that is totally worth paying for.   (back)
4. and the two scripts above have inspired me to make another script, one more complicated than LibraryDroid.   (back)
5. you can’t change rings, wallpapers, volume, etc.   (back)

But wait, there's more

• Judge Droid lays down the law
• Project Idea: Locale as a Script on Android
• LibraryDroid tracks your books
• Oh the places you’ll go with your magical phone
• Every Frame a Wallpaper

This work by MattK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International