Hack The Now

Time-aware Blackberry Alerts

If you’ve got a Blackberry, you know the feeling…you pull it out of the holster, and there’s a meeting alert sitting there right on top of everything, with the big “Open | Dismiss | Snooze” buttons. It’s one of those little “Aw, crap!” moments…Am I late for something?

It’s trying to be helpful, by popping up 15mins (or whatever) before the meeting, but then it just continues to sit there, reproachfully, once the meeting’s already started. You could have time to spare, or you could be half an hour late—it always looks the same.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to have clear, immediately visible indicator where you stood, temporally, in relation to the meeting’s  start time?

 

"Status Zones" on Google Latitude (or, as I call it, “Google Blackberry Finder”)

I’ve already taken to Google Latitude—not that I want everyone in the world to know where I am, but I’m very willing to let my wife be aware. (There’s also one critically important benefit that I’m surprised isn’t being played up more…it can help me find my Blackberry. Even if it won’t tell me what room of the house it’s in—and yes, I know, it needs to be on—at least I can see if it’s still chugging its way north on the train without me, or sitting at the office.)

Anyway, as I’ve tried to keep my location status up to date, it’s quickly started to feel pretty absurd. Why not define bounding boxes on Google maps, and create rules about automatically switching my status on Latitude whenever I enter or exit a given zone.

Every time I move into the bounding box around my office, it could automatically set my status to “At Work”. When I leave a bounding box, it could either just set my status to blank, or to a generic “On the move” status.

Possible extension: Allow crowd-sourced zones, that you could subscribe to at will, much like you can already do with dates on Google Calendars.

GPS-based, automated time zones

Drives me crazy when I get into Austin from NY, and get thrown off by forgetting to reset the timezone on my Blackberry. Why can't it use the GPS to tell when I've shifted timezones, and either remind me, or change it automatically?

FB Connect-based blog access, for _just_ my Friends

I'd like to essentially password-protect some or all of my personal blog, but then easily offer authenticated access to my network of friends on Facebook. Blog posts can obviously already be auto-announced on FB, but it would be great to be sure that only that same group could actually read the post. Possible extension: Only grant access to specific networks or individuals