Driving Mode

Driving Mode

The view you open before you get in the car. Sidebar → Tools → Driving Mode (/driving-mode).

Driving Mode answers two questions with large, glanceable rows:

1. What is my next equipment pickup or return?
2. Where do I need to be today?

Every row that has a location carries a big Open in Maps button. The view is read-only — it never changes your schedule or sub-rentals — and works fully offline.

Pickups & returns

The top card lists upcoming pickups and returns from all your sub-rentals, soonest first.

• The soonest entry at or after the current time is marked Next with a highlighted border.
• Today's entries read Today · HH:MM; later ones show weekday + date.
• Anything already past is hidden.
• A sub-rental whose status has moved to returned, completed, invoiced, archived or cancelled drops both its stops and stops sending reminders — even when the date is still in the future. The drive is done; the clock is not the thing that knows that.

A return with no return location

Leaving the sub-rental's return location blank means same as pickup — that is what its placeholder has always promised, and gear normally goes back where it came from. Driving Mode follows that: the return row navigates to the pickup address and the next-stop card labels it "Same as the pickup location", so you are never sent to an address you did not knowingly enter.

A return therefore only reports a missing location once both sides are blank.

Nothing listed? The rows come from the sub-rental's Pickup & Return date-and-time fields — a rental period alone is not enough. If a row disappeared before its date, check the sub-rental's status: setting it back to active brings the stop back.

Today's schedule

The second card shows what is shooting today, across every project.

• Prep, shooting and return days covering today each produce a row.
• Shooting rows show the call time when a call sheet exists for today; others show All day.
• The location resolves from the shoot location attached to that schedule entry, falling back to the project's primary location.
• A call sheet dated today also produces a row even if no schedule period covers the day.

Open in Maps

Rows with a usable location get a large Open in Maps button that opens your device's map app at that address — one tap from turn-by-turn directions on a phone.

• With exact coordinates the map opens on the precise point; otherwise it searches the address.
• Rows without a location show no button rather than a dead link.
• The app never navigates for you: it hands the address to your normal maps app.

Pickup & return reminders (optional)

Off by default. Enable at the bottom of Driving Mode and pick a lead time: 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, or 1 day before.

• The reminder names the pickup or return and carries the time and location in its text.
• Tapping it opens Driving Mode with the matching row's Open in Maps button right there.
• Reminders are scheduled on the device only — nothing is sent to a server.
• On iPhone, while connected to CarPlay these reminders appear on the CarPlay notification banner automatically — no CarPlay app and no extra permission required.
• Deny notification permission and the reminders still appear in the in-app notification bell; only the pop-ups are lost.
• Muting the Gear category in notification settings also silences them.

Reminders for events further than 30 days out are scheduled the next time you open the app, so a long-range booking is never lost.

Marking a stop as reached

The next-stop card picks its stop from the clock, which is right until it isn't: arrive early and you sit looking at a stop you are already standing in; run late and the card jumps ahead to one you have not left for yet.

Tap I'm here and that stop drops out of the running — the card moves on to wherever you are actually going next. Tap again to undo. When every stop for the day is marked, a short note replaces the card, with an undo for the last one in case of a mis-tap.

Marks are personal: they are not shared with the rest of the crew. They clear themselves after about a day and a half, so yesterday's route never suppresses today's.

Keeping the screen awake

A phone on a dash mount sleeps after a few seconds, which means unlocking it again at every junction. While Driving Mode is open the app asks the device to keep the screen lit. It is on by default; the switch at the bottom of the view turns it off if you would rather save battery.

The screen is released the moment you leave Driving Mode or switch to another app, and re-taken when you come back — it never holds the screen on behind your back. If the device refuses (battery saver is the usual reason), the view says so rather than letting the screen quietly sleep behind a setting that reads ON.

Using your location (optional)

Off by default. Switching it on asks your browser for permission — that prompt is the only consent involved, and nothing is requested until you turn the switch on.

With it on, the next-stop card shows how far that stop still is, and within about 200 m it offers to mark the stop reached. It only ever offers: a position fix can be a hundred metres out, so nothing is marked on your behalf.

Your position is used on the device to measure that distance; it is not stored or sent anywhere. Tracking stops when you leave Driving Mode or switch apps, and resumes when you return. Addresses without saved coordinates are looked up through the app's own server, so no request goes from your device to a mapping service directly.

Stops whose address is a single free-text line combining two places (for example "Studio A, Berlin · Moor Location, UK") cannot be resolved to one point, so no distance is shown for them. Saving a location with proper coordinates fixes it.

When you have no signal

Driving Mode reads from the copy of the plan already on your device, so it keeps working in a tunnel, an underground garage, or at a location with no reception. Nothing disappears when you lose signal.

What it cannot do is show a change someone made while you were offline. So when the connection drops, a line above the next-stop card says you are seeing the plan as it stood at your last connection. It clears itself once you are back on.

What Driving Mode is not

• It is not a CarPlay app and not a navigation app. Apple does not grant CarPlay entitlements for scheduling/office tools, so the car screen shows the notification banner only — which is exactly what the reminders above use.
• It does not edit data. Change a pickup time in the sub-rental; change a shoot day in the project schedule.

Related

• Calendar — the full dated view of every project
• Sub-rentals — where pickup/return times and locations are entered

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Last Updated: 2026-08-09 Version: 0.790.2