

Spacetime alarms - gregdetre
http://gregdetre.blogspot.com/2009/09/location-alarms.html

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rkowalick
The android application Locale ( <http://www.twofortyfouram.com/> ) certainly
seems like it could do (or come close to doing) most of these things.

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mcav
That shouldn't be too hard with GPS, minus the whole "no background apps"
thing: Just prompt users for a location (i.e. tap on a map) when setting an
alarm, with a radius perhaps. And to accommodate the "alarm" case, just add a
checkbox to "only activate while OUTSIDE this range".

Not sure if anything like this already exists either. It well might.

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dandelany
> minus the whole "no background apps" thing

That's kind of a huge thing - it's the difference between this idea working
and not working on the iPhone... and a great example of the kind of app
innovation Apple could inspire by allowing background processes.

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TrevorJ
I bought an ipod touch hoping to make some productive use of it The no
background processes thing makes that next to impossible. I can't risk my
fancy dancy alarm clock not going of because I went and checked my email and
forgot to re-open the alarm clock program. It's a huge problem with the
platform in my opinion. Heck, my Dell Axim PDA from 5 years ago would happily
run 6 or 8 apps at a time.

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stcredzero
Really? The Apple Clock program's Alarms seem to work in the background for
me.

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revicon
you're correct. Apple does not expose this functionality to 3rd party apps.

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TrevorJ
If you could integrate this with calenders and to-do lists on a hand held
device you'd really have something. In general the idea of an integrated,
contextually-aware smartphone would be great.

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Pahalial
Hm, active comment moderation on the blog. Anyway, someone has indeed done
this for the iphone (not that I've used it or can comment as to how well it
works):

<http://www.moop.me/inap.php>

It does appear to only cover one of his use-cases, sadly. But the others would
be difficult without backgrounding (and the theft alarm may require far too
much polling and battery drain to ever be useful.)

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noonespecial
Its cake on my pre. Its literally just a crontab entry and curl command and
the phone tweets its gps at intervals. It be easy to watch for a tweet outside
a range and alert me. Seems to add no battery drain at all. I'll have to see
if I can add playing a sound locally as well.

[http://palmpre-hacks.com/palm-pre-hacks/how-to-tweet-palm-
pr...](http://palmpre-hacks.com/palm-pre-hacks/how-to-tweet-palm-pres-gps-
location-to-your-twitter/)

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windsurfer
I would hate to have my gps location constantly be tweeted, personally, but
that's an awesome hack.

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frankus
A fourth example:

A game where you try and assassinate your friends by setting imaginary time
bombs to go off at a particular location when you think your friend will be
there.

Of course it could also be built on top of something like Loopt or BrightKite
if you and your friends compulsively check in everywhere you go.

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khafra
I've wanted behavior-aware alarms for a long time, but this is a good first
approximation.

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nkassis
Maybe something like that could tell me when I'm close to the grocery store
that I need to buy milk.

Wait a minute... Firing up the Ycomb application right now ;p

