To-do schedulers, especially mobile ones, should integrate with GPS turn-by-turn navigation (or at least Google Maps) and take travel time into account when popping up reminders.
⇦ "Programmer-Archeologist" | ⇨ Tines at the end of A Fire Upon the Deep |
13 March 2009, 3:44 UTCcomment by Thorne
This seems like the side-view of something much more directly useful/desirable: If an (online) organiser can tell where you are (note that this is a bigger problem than GPS can solve by itself: most people work indoors) and can make sensible observations about the available means of getting from one place to another, you don't just have an organizer, you have a transit-Optimizer. Consider some use cases:
- You're in an unfamiliar city, at your hotel, and you want to get to your conference, at a venue you've never been to before. You could get a taxi, or your Optimizer could get you there on public transport; since a lot of PT services track their vehicles with GPS now, it can plan your trip in four dimensions...
- You're a commuter. C*nnex have just nixed your entire train-line again because they can't be bothered running trains today, so you're forced to resort to one of a bazillion possible bus and tram services. It is vastly unlikely that you know them all, even in your home town, and the connections will take forever... unless they have been pre-Optimized for you.
- You want to meet your partner after work, get dinner, and go to a show. Your and your partner's finish times differ, but are semi-fixed. You present these constraints to your Optimizer, and it tells you and your partner which trams/trains/buses to catch, where to meet, which restaurants are within feasible travel distance between meeting-place and shows, how long you will have to eat given various scenarios, and how long the service is reputed to take at different places based on internet reviews.
- You're a paper-deliverer / courier / shuttle-bus driver / hasty sightseer; your Optimizer takes a list of your goals or destinations for the day, and picks out a route between them which takes the minimum possible time, yielding an estimate of when you'll get to the end-point.
I could go on. I love imagining use-cases...
