I started building a prototype for Should I cycle on iOS 8 and pretty early on I’ve hit a roadblock. What I wanted was a daily scheduled notification to popup telling me whether conditions were right for cycling or not.
I wanted to use iOS’s local notifications to do this – but I don’t think it can be done. Sure, you can schedule a local notification to popup at say 7:30am, but what’s displayed on the notification has to be set at the time the notification is scheduled. What this means is let’s say at 9pm at night I schedule a notification for 7:30am the next day. And at 9pm the sky is clear and conditions are fine. Then at 7:30am the next day it’s raining. Well, the 7:30am notification popup is going to say “Sky is clear” because that’s what the conditions were like when the notification was scheduled.
So that’s annoying.
What I want to do can be done via remote notifications – i.e. the I would have to schedule on a web server a push notification out to the mobile at 7:30am the next day. But that would be pretty complicated to setup for a prototype.
So I decided I would give up on the push notification for now and instead just check the current weather / cycling conditions whenever the app is started.
But then another thing happened – I gave up cycling to work for various reasons. So for now I have no motivation to work on this app. Maybe one day I’ll pick it up again.
