Copyright © 2011 David Talmage
This is free software whose distribution is governed by the GNU Public License version x.y. It is provided AS IS with NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING THE WARRANTY OF DESIGN, MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Are there people who need to know where you are right now? Maybe you are in poor health, left alone briefly while your care giver takes a short break. Maybe you are an activist in country with an oppressive governing regime. Maybe you are playing a city-wide game of Hide-and-Seek with your friends. How do you tell all of those people at the same time?
Panic Button is one way to do that. Set up your list of contacts. Create a brief message. Enable your GPS receiver. Leave Panic Button running on your desktop. When you press the single, large button, Panic Button sends your message plus your latitude and longitude as a Short Message Service (SMS) text to your contact list. To protect your contacts, Panic Button can erase your address book.
The menu has a number of entries for configuring Panic Button. Panic Button remembers these settings so you only have to make them once.
Select as many of your contacts as you desire. To select a contact, touch it until the background changes color.
Panic Button shows you only those contacts who have a mobile phone. You can filter the list by typing a few characters in the name of a contact. As you type, Panic Button hides those contacts who do not have that sequence of characters in their names. Press the backspace key to remove a character from the filter.
Remove all contacts from Panic Button's contact list. Panic Button asks you to confirm your desire to do this.
Type a brief message in the message input box. Remember to leave a few characters for the location.
The default message is "This is my location.".
By default, Panic Button receives location updates every 60 seconds. You can change this by setting the GPS update interval. Increasing the frequency of updates may improve the accuracy of the location Panic Button reports to your contacts but it may also hasten the draining of your battery. Conversely, decreasing the frequency of updates may degrade the accuracy of the location Panic Button reports to your contacts but it may have less of an impact on your battery life.
By default, Panic Button does not delete any of your contacts. You can change this by selecting "Delete Contacts on Panic". The next time you press the panic button, Panic Button will send its messages and delete every single one of your contacts. Back up your contacts to some place off your phone before you enable this option.
Generally, you will set up Panic Button once. Each time you run Panic Button, it restores the last collection of settings you made: contacts list, panic message, and GPS update interval.
Once it's set up, you can leave Panic Button running on your desktop. Press the big, green "Don't Panic" button when you need to send the panic message. While it is sending messages, Panic Button changes the button text to red "Panic!". After sending the message to the last contact, Panic Button changes the button text back to green "Don't Panic".
If you need support for Panic Button, please visit the Maemo.org Applications forum. Use the search facility to find treads about Panic Button.