Our pockets and camera bags are stuffed with
locationally aware devices, yet for some reason we find ourselves still having to do stuff manually when we get somewhere. Shouldn't our
thermostat click on the AC when we head home? Shouldn't our house lock itself when we embark on our morning commute? Shouldn't our car come and rescue us, even if it entails turbo boosting through a brick wall? We tend to think so, and Sunlight Foundation's geocron is a simple way to start that kind of automation. Born out of a desire for one of the app's developers to avoid having to manually send his wife a text to pick him up at the train station, geocron tracks your location in
Google Latitude and automatically e-mails, text messages, or pings a web page when you reach a certain location. You can set up windows of time for each activity and, while using this service does have the somewhat disconcerting requirement of perpetual access to your current location, the source code is available so you can run your own, private instance. Or, you could just give your wife a call -- regular conversation is generally considered an important part of a healthy relationship.
posted July 12th 2010 11:01AM
Seems I remember a movie like this... Ah yes, Wall-E.
@Slappy Wag time for lunch, in a cup!
Only batman's car comes with the "turbo boost through a wall" package.
Costs a million of course.
@SolidSnake
No, no, no... you are confusing K.I.T.T with the Bat Mobile.
@SolidSnake
I seriously don't want people's cars going kool-aid man style through walls. Otherwise our future will look like a dojo after a major ninja ambush. There will be uncomfortable drafts and I will have to wear a sweater vest.
@SolidSnake Who needs turbo boost when you've got cars with lasers on their heads?
@tricheboars
Rofl, thanks for the Monday morning laugh.
the government doesn't waste money tracking people anymore because they track themselves.
Can i make my teacher sick whenever im 10 mins away from school?
Not working... how do i config a ruleset?
I just got my first Android phone, the HTC Legend, and I'm freaking impressed. Looking forward to more of this stuff.
@donv69
Android has an app that was built by MIT students that does exactly this. Look up Locale. Amazing free app.
@j5uh
Locale is $10. It is not free.
@dibs oddjob
Saw that. A little steep.
nevermind that your phone will last about 40 minutes if the gps is constantly on and reporting :P
So basically they have added geofencing for private people... Neat...
Lots of cool ideas can come from this.
I REALLY love the idea of having a location and time aware system to turn on or off a home's heating and cooling system. There was a post a few weeks ago about AC and it was appalling to see so many people leaving theirs on all day long... especially so on a techblog where these people should already be aware of simple $20 devices that would let you set timers.
This app seems to go one step farther which is really cool.
I could envision a future in which you could leave your heat or AC off all day when no one is around, but it would turn itself on at either a predetermined time, or when the GPS in your phone saw that you were 10 minutes from home. At which point, it would kick in and cool your house in the summer, or start to warm it in the winter.
@Hazdaz
Or you could just get a programmable thermostat and set it to deactivate heating/cooling when you leave in the morning and reactivate shortly before you get home. They have been around forever.
@jkharri
But that only works for people with a set schedule. Nor does it work well on weekends where people have different plans.
There are many people that have weird hours in which a simple timer doesn't work very well. Then there are extended periods, like going on vacation in which people might not normally bother to re-set their timers.
Like I posted above, this takes the idea of a timer one step farther.
If you are leaving work and instead of setting your GPS for home, instead set it for someplace else, your phone could then relay that info to your home system and delay turning on your AC. Or on the flip side, if you leave work 2 hours early, this could turn on the heat in the wintertime, instead of coming in to a cold house.
Simple timers are a start, but this takes it to the next level.
Finally, after almost 10 years after publishing this!
Great KnightRider reference. Brightened my dull Monday.
Why the hell do you post articles with no links to the actual site? This is really annoying. I had to google Geocron locaiton to find it (call me lazy, I call it poor blogging). If you're going to blog about an amazing new web app, please include the damn link to the site! If you did, then make it a little more apparent. I even searched through view source to find geocron.us and it's no where to be found on your page.
@j5uh How about you click on the 'Source' link, you know the one that's on the bottom of just about every Engadget post?
@dkratter14 GAH! That's just not apparent. Plus that only links to another blog that they cited from. Why not add the link directly to the geocron website?
@j5uh Another blog? Dude, that link goes to Sunlight, who created the app :)
Neither app is free, but both Locale and Tasker are available for Android phones that do what Geocron does.
I was looking for a way to use this for the iPhone but I guess geocron isn't really an app yet... but it seems like a cool idea and I want to use it!
I can do a lot of this with Locale and it's various plug ins.
Can't Locale do this?