Naggie Ties Reminders to Location


location based sertvices

Ever fail to remember to stop by the grocery store on the way home to pick up a gallon of milk? Or, perhaps, forget to grab the milk even though you remembered to make that grocery pit stop? A new application called Naggie will not only remind you to pick up the milk, it’ll actually tell you to hit the local market as you drive by the store.
Naggie enables users to set reminders based on location thanks to the GPS (global positioning system) chip in the BlackBerry 7520, which is offered by Sprint Nextel in the United States. It is the first mobile application (J2ME) written by Andrew Zimmer, who told PDAStreet he created Naggie after downloading what he called "RIM's relatively open API" and running with it.

With Naggie, you can set a reminder so the next time you leave the office a popup screen, vibration, message (e-mail, PIN, SMS) or a jingle reminds you to pick up dinner on the way home, for example. Or set a "buy some apples" reminder that’ll go off the when you pass by the fresh fruit stand. Additional examples Zimmer provided PDAStreet included reminders to feed the cat when you get home, try a restaurant upon arrival in Paris, or display a list of job details when driving up to a work site.

Zimmer asserts Naggie is unique because users define locations that are meaningful to them. You can do this in several ways: have the software set the GPS coordinates for your current location (a favorite coffee shop for instance), choosing any street in the U.S, selecting almost any city in the world, or basing your reminders on a particular latitude/longitude coordinate.


Save Naggie Location

While Naggie is currently location specific (e.g. the coffee shop example), Zimmer’s goal is to eventually bring categories - all coffee shops - into the mix as well. One method would be to add a field for category into the Naggie database on the BlackBerry and set naggies (reminders) based on that option instead of a specific location. Another would be to have Naggie wirelessly pull GIS data from the Internet.

To Zimmer the need for Naggie seemed obvious. "Every couple of days I kept expecting to hear that someone else created a similar application," he explained.

The BlackBerry 7520, which Naggie supports, leverages A-GPS (Assisted GPS) over Sprint Nextel’s network to greatly improve GPS performance for small handheld devices. But Zimmer said Naggie works even when the Sprint Nextel cellular network is out of range, leveraging just raw GPS data. The GPS signal alone is a lot less responsive, however, at least initially.


Reminder Delivery Options

A visit to Tucson, Arizona put Naggie to the test. Zimmer’s BlackBerry 7520 couldn't access the cellular network, so there was no A-GPS assistance. The BlackBerry took much longer to get a GPS response from orbiting satellites alone, but once it did, he was able to use Naggie without a hitch.

Because Naggie is a GPS application, and because GPS is power hungry, especially in smartphones and handhelds, Zimmer recommends users plug their Blackberry 7520's in a lot. You can always turn Naggie off to save power too, but that defeats the whole purpose of the application.

RIM’s BlackBerry 7100i includes a GPS chip too, so technically it should support Naggie, but Zimmer has only tested the software on the BlackBerry 7520 at this time. So he can only recommend BlackBerry 7520 compatibility.

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