Review conditions
I was running Y-Tasks on my Nokia E65 smartphone using the latest version 0.50 of the application and all plug-ins.
Installation
At first you have to install the main application Y-Tasks. The installer creates an extra folder “DrJukka.com” where all applications of the same author, like Y-Browser, will be moved into. Since the main application is just some kind of loader, you need to install several plug-ins. Without plug-ins you can’t do anything with Y-Tasks. Installing all plug-ins is quite a long procedure, but you are very flexible and don’t need to install things you don’t use. Uninstalling single plug-ins is also possible.
First view
Once everything is installed you get a pretty powerful tool. In the main menu you can switch to landscape mode or choose between list or grid styled menus, while the grid menu is hard to read.
For instance you can view all applications installed on your phone with the possibility to show information or launch them. You can also view running tasks, switch to them or close them directly. Functions mostly take some seconds to load. They do what they are supposed to do: providing information on your system.
Main features
One of the main features of Y-Tasks is the “Memory Status” panel. It will show you how much RAM is still available and how much space is free on your disks with nice pie charts on just one page. Very well arranged. From the menu it is possible to compress RAM. Unfortunately this function doesn’t free any memory at all, perhaps because there is enough free RAM left.
Another interesting function delivered by Y-Tasks is the “Apps & Tasks” panel. Every single application installed on your smartphone is shown there. You can directly launch a chosen app or show information about it. What is more, this panel shows every active task. From here you can either switch to a task or close it.
A very nice feature is “Trace”. Trace tracks CPU and RAM usage. Once you activated Trace a thread is started that records these information, even when the main application Y-Tasks is closed. If you start it again you will be shown CPU load in a nice graph. To see all processes and threads running on your phone just start according plug-in.
There are still some more or less advanced features to mention. At the one hand there is this list of all registered file types and their associated applications. You sadly cannot change the associations here, would have been a nice feature. At the other hand Y-Tasks offers some functions that seem to be very useful for software developers. These may be the crash monitor and a kind of test centre for fonts. As the name already says the crash monitor will watch programs and what happened if they crashed. Behind “Fonts” you can paste some text or open a text file and apply different fonts to the text.
Handling
There is almost nothing to complain about the handling of Y-Tasks and its plug-ins, since this application can be mostly controlled by the directions keys. It doesn’t have any shortcuts, and it doesn’t need any. All in all a very intuitive handling.
Weaknesses
I just found three major weaknesses when using Y-Tasks. One problem is the installation. It just takes to long to install all needed plug-ins seperately. Why not offer an installer that installs the whole package? Another problem is, that the program does not remember the last view you have chosen. If you would like to use the list based view, you will have to set it up each time you start the app. The last weakness I found was that the functions of the direction keys are not changed when switching to landscape mode. In consequence handling does not work intuitively anymore.
Conclusion
Especially for software developers Y-Tasks could be a very interesting application. For the common user this application does not offer plenty of useful features. Otherwise the idea of this plug-in based software makes it pretty easy to extend functionality. Taking into account, that there are some weaknesses I rate Y-Tasks with 3 of 5 stars.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
hey. i downloaded the app and installed successfully. great app. but i cant seem to find Fonts and Traces pluggins anywhere. any idea where i can find them?
Real,
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