MarcoPolo

Where I go, it knows

MarcoPolo is an interesting application designed to have your laptop behave with some intelligence. We all know this is good, right? It is designed to become aware of your differing daily requirements and track what you are doing. No it is not a security application but a "context-aware" application that can automatically adjust the context of your computing environment according to a number of rules based on time of day, activity, and where you are. The idea is that it monitors your laptop and continually(not continuously- although every 5 seconds might seem like continuously) is able to adjust settings presumably to make your life easier. It's not directly AppleScriptable but can run scripts. It is Growl (notifications) aware.

I am amazed by the gamut of possibilities. The one misgiving is What happens when you decide to be a bit cantankerous- and don't follow your normal pattern of interaction? It could turn on Bluetooth and tell everyone in range you haven't interacted with it for some time- and ask: "What's wrong with me?"

But seriously, I can think of some really good uses for this: setting up in the morning for work, for each lesson, for perhaps a meeting, for a debriefing session in the afternoon. I know it takes me some time to reconfigure my laptop to begin a lesson- open Filemaker Pro for my plan, open Excel for my marking register, find, queue up and open the video podcasts I want to show... Set firewall rules, Open and close network connections, mount shares, select the nearest printer etc.., etc...

I'd appreciate some help doing this... really I would... And best of all it's free to download and use. Well worth a look.