An app that tells me if the current time is within specified bounds

July 11, 2018 11:11 PM

If I want to park my car near my house it has to be outside of certain times & days because of parking rules. Is there an iPhone app where I can just input those rules, and then when I open the app it’s just a screen that says OK TO PARK or NOT OK TO PARK?

The rules themselves won’t change or depend on location so they can be hard coded for my purpose.

posted by bleep to Technology (4 answers total)

I think you can script something like this up yourself using Workflow (which Apple acquired a while back, so it's sort of a first-party iphone app now). Somewhat similar to your use case, I have a workflow that polls a local lake level and tells me if it's deep enough for canoeing.
posted by mumkin at 11:31 PM on July 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

Not quite as blatantly YES/NO BIG SCREEN as you're asking for, but any calendaring app should let you set up the OK (or not OK) times as repeating events, and will also show some kind of clearly discernible marker for the current time, which will clearly be inside one of those events or not.
posted by flabdablet at 12:06 AM on July 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

This probably doesn't help you, but I use Metromile for car insurance and their app does this in my city. They have a ODBC device hooked up to my car so they know where it is, and their app alerts me if I'm in a sweep/ticket zone. Can't even count the number of tickets this has saved me.

I don't know of anything equivalent, but I know you can DIY the car tracking using open source software like Traccar so maybe that's a good place to direct your searches?
posted by bradbane at 1:13 AM on July 12, 2018

Response by poster: The calendar option does seem like the easiest solution for now.
posted by bleep at 2:09 PM on July 12, 2018