Wake me up (before i miss my stop again!)

I have a habit of falling asleep on moving vehicle if i am not driving. Before this week, i fell asleep on metro buses almost all the time and normally on the bus from work to Queen Anne. Other than being embarrassed by the fact that drivers had to wake me up on several occasions when i reached the destination terminal stop, i had never missed my stop. On two occasions, the drivers had to get my fellow passengers to wake me up. Even if i had to take the public transit to work, i never had a problem of missing my stop since the last portion of my commute was on an employer-sponsored shuttle bus.

Anyway, to save myself from embarrassment again, i had been thinking about writing a location-based iPhone app that will wake up me when it is near my destination. Because Apple does not allow third-party apps to multitask by running in background, it is impossible to create an Apple-approved app that will do what i want. I find it really retarded that the application has to be the active app on the iPhone in order to function properly. What happens if i get a call while the app is running? If i choose the pick up the call, the app is dead. I will have to relaunch it later. So i put off the idea of developing such an app on the iPhone, at least not until Apple changes it iron-fisted policy not permitting apps to run in background.

This week, i started taking the metro bus to work. Bus 30 takes me all the way from Queen Anne to 70th/Sand Point Way. It was a close call for me yesterday as i woke up less than two blocks away from my stop. I was not so lucky this morning. As usual, i fell asleep missing my stop and found myself waking up in an unfamiliar area. Turned out, metro bus 30 took me to the NOAA location for the Northwest region in Seattle, about 7 blocks away from my original stop. As the security guard boarded the bus to check for NOAA employee ID cards, i had to tell him that i missed my stop. So i walked in the rain for several blocks until i flagged down a bus.

Immediately after arriving at work, i decided that i really needed a location-based app on my iPhone. A little research on google pointed me to iNap, a basic iPhone app that pretty much does what i need. My original iPhone does not come with GPS so it uses cell-tower triangulation to determine my location and for most part, it has been quite accurate. So i purchased iNap, which costs $0.99. I will test it over the next few days to see how well it holds up in real life.