Geek & Mild by Sean Sperte
Hello. Welcome to the weblog of Sean Sperte. This is an article originally posted on July 17, 2008. Read more →
Merlin Mann started up a discussion for iPhone app ideas and the floodgates opened.
I’d love to have a GPS- and Bluetooth-enabled phone settings app that would tell the iPhone to activate/disactivate call forwarding based on your location. For example, if you get poor or no signal where you live, you could pair the app with your home computer and every time you come home it would tell the iPhone to forward calls to your home phone.
Technically, I’m not sure this type of app would even work. First, there is very little (if any) documentation about the iPhone’s Bluetooth capabilities in the SDK. Second, even if hooks were provided, I think the app would have to be launched in order to perform any sort of action (such as setting call forwarding); which sort of defeats the purpose.
Anyway, some of the ideas in the comments on Merlin’s article are great. Take a look. Especially if you’re a developer.
I’d like to see an app that controls your ring/vibrate function based on location and your calendar. basically it would switch to silent mode automatically during meeting times, etc. or if it detected you were in certain areas that you had flagged for silent or ring, like driving in the car, at the movies etc. I’m always changing it back and forth and i forget sometimes. I often get the evil eye from the Mrs. when its causing a racket in inappropriate places. Its more of an app geared toward the scatterbrained and often confused, such as myself.
§ Jamie · 18 July 2008
Regarding your suggestion:
GPS is more short-term realistic, since you say Bluetooth is not currently well documented. To apply some settings based on location (as well as time) would be great, as commenter Jamie says.
It won’t be much bother to launch an app to make this work, it would still be very convenient and elegant. Besides, GPS and Bluetooth work when you turn on your iPhone, you’ll have to turn it on to make this protocols work.
Still having to launch an app, it’s very convenient: Arrive at the place, turn on your phone, and tap an icon and all your location- and time-based settings are applied making use of CoreLocation and Calendar.
My suggestions
1. I’ll also like a Spotlight-like app that’s also plugin-enabled. Search for a word that’s in your calendar, mail, sms’s, contacts, music, etc.
2. Decently- or Full-featured text editor and spreadsheet. Like a CocoaTouch version of the excellent (now on Blackberry too) Dataviz’s Documents to Go: http://www.dataviz.com/products/documentstogo/premium/
§ Andrés · 20 July 2008