iOS 9’s reminders app includes a pretty useful new feature. When choosing “Remind me at a location” reminders now lets you select to be reminded when “Getting in my car” or “Getting out of my car”. It does this my knowing when your iPhone is connected to your car via bluetooth and I think, usb. Once your car connects to your phone or terminates the connection to your iPhone, you receive the alert.
This is incredibly useful for reminding me to do something before I actually leave instead of after i have already started driving away. It’s also useful to notify you of things you might want to do while in your car. Like clean up the empty bottles of Poland spring water, or make a phone call while driving, or listen to a podcast or audio book.
It would be awesome if I could assign, getting into, or, getting out of my car, to a context.
Taking the idea a bit further: It would be even more awesome if you could set that in addition to (instead of in place of) a location so you could be notified when in car and at a certain location, or allow some operator. like when getting into my car and at work. Or, getting out of my car or arrive home. Though it’s also possible this could be accomplished by nesting contexts.
If I remembered correctly, there was a way to use QR codes or NFC tags to run a shortcut to open an OmniFocus perspective. Just wave your phone near the NFC tag or scan a QR code when you leave or enter your car.
Not as automatic but it might be a poor man’s solution until a built in feature arrives.
If you really want something like that. This the following could work. However, I have not taken the time to test it myself.
Create an Apple Shortcut that does what you want. If you want to see a certain tag, then you could use the tags URL (sharesheet → Copy) to call it. E.g.
If you do that you have to run it once in order to allow the shortcut access to the OF URL.
Then you go to Automations section in Apple Shortcuts app. Create a new automation entry and use Bluetooth. Choose your car as Device and check Is Connected and Run Immediately.
I don‘t know how you want to be reminded (maybe add a notification with a sound to the Apple Shortcut), but when your iPhone now connects to your cars bluetooth, the whole thing should run.
Plan B: If above does not work out, you could link automation to the change of an Apple Focus. Your iPhone would need to switch to a Driving focus (don‘t know its English name) when connected to your car.
