Settings Profiles uses

[malachus]

So, here are some of the ways I use Settings Profiles.

• Control phone volume in certain places at certain times (work, church, etc.)
  
• Control power consuming features in certain places and/or times (wifi off at work, wifi on at home, etc)
  
• Nag reminders every X minutes for missed calls or text messages (replacing Missed Call app)
  
• Turning on the ringer and ringing over and over on specific text message (replacing lost phone finding app)
  
• Turning on media volume when I plug in headphones
  
• Turning on power consuming features when the phone is charging
  
• Turning off everything but the ringer at night when I am at home and I should be asleep
  
• Turning on GPS for short periods of time when I know I'll actually need it
  
• Turning off power consuming features when the battery is very low
  

Now, all of this can get a bit complicated. If you just wanted a simple time based set of profiles, something like Timerrific would suffice. Settings Profiles allows for multiple profiles to be applied in a stacked manner which allows for a lot more variation in complexity. A side effect is that it takes some thinking (like a programmer) to understand how things will interact. I'm going to try to deconstruct some of my configurations here.

First of all, I have four locations. Mostly because I'm boring. I have Work, Home, Home (wifi), and Church. Aside from the Home (wifi) one, these are all location based and, since I don't enable GPS very often, that means they are using the Google location API. This generally works fine, although it seems like there are issues sometimes. I think in part of my house the closest cell tower doesn't provide adequate coverage, so a different cell tower that shouldn't have the range to get here does and it makes it seem like the phone is about a mile further North than it actually is. I believe this is due to living on the side of a hill which faces away from the closest tower. Aside from that, it seems to work well.

I also have a ton of profiles, some of which exist for rules and some of which only exist for ad hoc activation.

Rules Sets:

• Airplane - turns off all radios (for ad hoc use)
  
• Audio On - turns on media and ringer volumes
  
• Auto Sync - turns on auto sync (this was for a failed experiment, I might discuss it later)
  
• Bluetooth On - duh (for ad hoc use)
  
• Charging - turns on wifi, auto sync, and sets the screen timeout to 5 minutes
  
• GPS on - duh (for ad hoc use)
  
• High Power - turns on wifi, auto sync, sets the screen timeout to 1 minute (this is deprecated)
  
• Loud - Sets the media and ringer volume to high (for ad hoc use)
  
• Media On - turns on the media volume
  
• Power Save - turns off bluetooth, wifi, gps, auto sync, sets the screen timeout to 15 sec, turns off vibrate
  
• Ring Only - turns off the media and notification volumes, turns off vibrate
  
• Silent - turns off volumes and turns off vibrate
  
• Vibrate - turns off volumens and turns on vibrate
  
• Wifi On - duh
  
• Work Power Save - turns off bluetooth and wifi, sets the screen timeout to 30 seconds
  

Okay, so those are the configurations. Then things get all complicated with rules. Some of them are quite simple. When I'm at home, it turns on wifi. When I'm at home and it's night time and I don't have headphones plugged in, it goes to ring only and power save mode. When I'm at work during business hours, it turns on work power save and vibrate modes.

The complicated ones are triggering notify events on missed calls and missed texts, and doing loud notify events when I get specific information in a text. I don't really use some of the capabilities around texts received or incoming phone calls from specific numbers or groups. Let alone the calendar stuff.

I really just scratch the surface of what can be done, I just think it's unfortunate that it's probably daunting for most people to figure out the nuances to setting up things so they work the way they want. That's probably the biggest problem with an otherwise incredibly powerful tool.