Geo-aware settings toggle

[Woodbags]

I've come up with an idea I think apple should include in iOS and can't think of anywhere to post it except here.

Settings which toggle on/off based on your pre-determined geographic locations, I can already think of 3 such uses that would improve my user experience.

-Set an inbox to turn off when you enter a certain location. My iPhone picks up my work and personal emails, I switch off the work mailbox as soon as I get home (not getting paid-not bothered), surely this could be an automatic feature.

-As soon as I leave my house I switch off wi-fi, outside of my home I want to predominantly use 3G and not be notified of all the pay wi-fi locations that are available.

-Set an alarm which does not go off when I am in a certain location. When I stay at my g/f's both our alarms go off at the same time. It would be useful if the device knew my location and toggled off my alarm.

There are thousands of possibilities for this feature that would really enhance iOS.

 

[james92se]

I'm really curious as to the usefulness of the geo-reminders. I can see how they would work to remind you to do something when you arrive at X location, but some of the examples I've seen - for example, setting a geo-reminder to do such and such and such before leaving for work in the morning - I just don't see how this would be all that helpful. If I'm home and leave for work forgetting to do whatever it was that I was supposed to do, when will my geo-reminder notify me? When I'm already driving down my street? It seems in this situation the geo-reminder will always inherently be slightly too "late" to be useful.

 

[deeddawg]

Unfortunately they weren't able to get the prescience module encoded into the geo-reminders in time, so it's not able to know you're about to do something like leave the house. The workaround until this is updated would be to use a time-based reminder; i.e. if you typically leave for work at 7:30am, set the reminder for 7:20am.

What would be cool is to have it key off of something like connecting to your car's bluetooth. Then the reminder would pop up as you turned on your car, so then you'd be reminded to go back in the house if you had forgotten whatever the reminder was for.

I see it as handy to remind you to do things as you get to a destination (call GLaDOS when you get home), or on your way from one place to another (buy a cake on the way home from work). You're right though, the location aware isn't so useful for reminders to do something before you leave a destination.