Yesterday I was running late. I mean literally running late. I had gone for a run in DC, and is my custom I got totally lost. By the time I was headed back in the right direction I was hopelessly late to meet Shira. At a stoplight I hammered out two sentence text: "running late." That's about all the energy I could muster for the task of warning her.
As I jogged toward our meeting point it occurred to me that I should be able to automate what I had just done. And by the time I had finished my run I had a new little tasker app designed in my head. I give you: Report Location.
First I created a trivial Task with the following actions:
1. Get Location 2. Variable SET: %loc_esc = %LOC 3. Variable Convert: URL Encode %loc_esc 4. Send SMS: Number = Shira's phone number, Body: "My location: http://maps.google.com/?q=%loc_esc
When I run this script Shira gets an SMS message with a URL that contains a link to my current location. Clicking on it gives her the open of opening up Google Maps.
So rather than reporting that I'm running late I can just show her where I'm at. But my little setup goes one step further.
I attached the above Task to a named profile ("Report Location Profile") which had the criteria set to:
From: 00:01 To: 23:59 Repeat: 5 minutes
In other words I put this task in a profile that runs all day, every 5 minutes. That's a whole lot of SMSs.
To finish this guy off I created two new tasks: Start Report Location and Stop Report Location. They both have the same shape:
1. Notify: Title = "Report Location (On|Off)" 2. Vibrate: Time = 248 3. Profile Status: Name = Report Location Profile, Set: (On|Off)
In other words, when I run the on version of the task I trigger a notification message ("Location Report On"), vibrate the phone for 248 millis (so I get tactile feedback) and most importantly enable the named profile above. Running the off version of the task does exactly what you'd expect, giving a sane message and turning off the profile.
Finally, I added two short-cuts to my home screen: Start Report Location and Stop Report Location.
Next time I'm running late I need only hit one icon on my screen. Then, every 5 minutes or so Shira will get an update of my location.
Now, if only Tasker could get me to run faster...
I'm sure this was fun to build, but you could just use Glympse which is built precisely for this use case.
ReplyDeletehttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.glympse.android.glympse
Sweet - thanks for sharing!
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