Introduction

Epic Location-based Reminders

When I Get There is a powerful way to remind yourself of things you need to do when you arrive at or leave a location.

But it’s also much more.

It’s a totally private, iCloud-synced way to make sure you never forget something important. Unlike the system Reminder.app, if you set a reminder to water the plants when you arrive home, When I Get There will remind you - and then keep reminding you - over and over again until you mark the task complete.

I have kids. And I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve told my phone “Hey, Siri. Remind me to pre-heat the oven when I get home”, only to arrive home and immediately get distracted and overwhelmed by all the things the kids need - annnnd completely forget to turn on the oven.

WIGT will re-remind you every minute to pre-heat the oven until you do it. Or, it can remind you every five minutes. Every half-hour. Whatever works for you. Or, right from your phone’s lock screen, you can snooze the reminder for a couple hours, a day, or week.

That’s all great. But with WIGT you can also do way more. Things like…

• Create a reminder that repeats every time you arrive or leave a specific location.
• Reminders that are only active during a certain time of day or day of the week.
• Setup “Location Patterns” that trigger a reminder when you arrive/leave certain locations in a specific order. Example: I commute every day from south of Nashville to north of Nashville. I need to remember to buy some bagels from our favorite bakery downtown, but only when I’m headed home. So, I set a reminder that fires when I arrive in Nashville after leaving my office north of the city. That way I don’t get notified on my way to work that morning.

You can also run custom actions when a reminder is due or when you mark one as complete and/or when you snooze it. Actions can be things like…

• Run one of your Siri shortcuts
• Make a custom HTTP GET or POST request to a web service
• Trigger an action on IFTTT
• Send a text message. (No, really. Not just “compose a text message that you then have to manually send”, but actually send a text message using our optional service.)
• Make a phone call.
• Send an email.
• Run custom JavaScript

And the actions you choose can be combined together and also take advantage of variables such as…

• Your current coordinates, address, or city
• Travel time to a favorite destination or the location of your next calendar event
• Use JavaScript to calculate and return your own variables

Those values can then be used inside your actions. Say every Monday morning you have an all-staff meeting at work. Create a reminder that fires when you leave your house on Mondays, that then calculates your drive time to the office, and if that estimate is longer than your normal commute, send an email to your boss saying you’re running late and what your ETA is.

I’ve also spent an enormous amount of time trying to make When I Get There as fast as possible. And by fast, I mean how quickly can you use the app to create a reminder. How few taps does it take. How much effort and overhead is there involved. Because if it’s a pain in the ass and requires twenty taps just to remember to buy milk, you’re never gonna use it.

So that’s WIGT. Those are my goals for the epic location-based reminders app of my dreams. There’s also other features to add like Siri Shortcuts, an Apple Watch app, and syncing to all of your other devices. Sync support is pretty much complete, and Siri and Apple Watch will arrive before too long as those are features I really want to use myself.

Does this sound like an app you’d like to use yourself? I’d love any feedback you can offer.