Sometimes it's really annoying and/or embarrassing to have your phone ring loudly in a meeting, theatre or something like that, because you have forgotten to change your Profile to silent. Similarly it's annoying to hear from your friends/colleges complaints of why you didn't reply to your IM when you forgot to change the status to busy. Since often these events are repeating or entered in your Calendar it would beneficial to be able to somehow combine these so that it would do it automatically for you.

http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...ges_im_status/

Is Context Kit, mentioned in the latest suggestion, something that will be implemented in Maemo 5 or something for the next version of the OS?

I have no idea, but it sure does look very interesting...

Shouldn't this functionality be perfect for Shepherd? I took the liberty of adding that as a solution in brainstorm.

The location aware stuff, perhaps. However, I think that Calendar and whatever the Alarms app is should have this profile/staus fields built in, if this is possible. It's a much cleaner way of dsoing things than needing settings in another app. Plus, I get the impression Shephard might be being expected to carry too much functionality...

I agree with your last sentence.

I do however like the idea of having one place to turn to for all "scheduling" purposes.
The answer to how to get the device to automatically do something is always the same and you have one place only in which to set up and manage all your schedules, not the calendar for time-triggered things, maybe maps for location-triggered things and a third place for a third trigger. Not to mention output support would have to be duplicated in all those places. Updates with respect to one output which should support several different triggers would have to be made to all those places. Organizing updates and maintenance to be done to all those places in a streamlined manner might be troublesome.

It also feels practical to have it all in one central framework with respect to carrying functionality. The application can grow over time, adding input or output options. Maybe even with a plugin-type system making it easy for other communtiy members to help adding functionality.

But my understanding is that there already is <fx: pause to google Maemo documentation> an alarm framework in Maemo 5. What this suggestion is about is integrating functionality into the most common ways people will set alarms. Having a seperate app seems redundant to me; what's needed is extension of the way the time based apps use react to the alarm event, thus making them more rich. Solution 6 seems to have covered my ideas the best, and extended them with the bloody good holiday idea.

I agree. Having an integrated system is better than a separate application. Basically a Calendar/Profile plug-in based on Solution 6 would be great.

Hmm... According to this profile handling (profiled) is closed source. I wonder if this makes it more difficult to implement this idea?

No, libprofile (a library that can be used to switch profiles, get the name of the current profile, etc.) is closed-source, yes, but the headers are available (in the nokia-binaries repo) so a person can write a program that changes the current profile.

I actually wrote a 3 line \"program\" (using libprofile) that just switched between the General and Silent programs depending on what profile it was currently in (needed a one-click toggle on my desktop...).