GPS App idea

[Richard Franks]

On Wed, 2006-11-22 at 15:12 +0100, collin at betaversion.net wrote:
> > All I really want from the Neo is a GPS application that helps me when
> > I have gone senile and can't find my car in a big parking lot. Ideally
> > it would constantly monitor my speed and "mark" the last place I
> > changed from driving speeds to a long period of walking speeds. No
> > user interaction until I ask it, "Where is my car in relation to where
> > I am right now?" and it displays a big arrow and distance reading.
> 
> If you park in a public garage you don't have gps, so your app wouldn't work.

Would it be possible to perform similar triangulation from nearby
cell-towers or do they not broadcast time?

Another idea is to determine when the user has parked - if you've been
moving faster than walking speed, and stop or start moving at walking
speed, or are 'in a building' (verifyable by image analysis or GPS
status: no-signals, or last-known location), it isn't an impossible
challenge to pop up an option-icon to allow the user to input their
location graphically.

Furthermore it could be extended by marking parking garages locations (a
finite number per city) - if a GPS signal is lost right at the entrance
then there is greater probability that the user has entered it. There is
a small community overhead in doing this, but it'd be an infrequent
task, and sections/numbering per garage could also be recorded to assist
the location input.

Ultimately this extends way beyond just parking garages, but there does
seem to be a lot of re-usable principles which makes the possibilities
interesting.

A little off-topic, but I'd sacrifice some valuable screen space for a
'predictive option' bar, comprising of 3-4 icons - applications could
come with code or heuristics to determine the likelihood of their
imminent use -- they report this back to the 'predictive option bar'
which applies simple weighting based upon the past hit-ratio of the app
in question - could be a useful tool?

Richard