Leave on time — travel times right inside the event

Olle has swimming practice at 5pm in Helsingborg. You glance at the calendar at 4:30 and think there's plenty of time. You start the pasta water. At 4:42 you remember it's Saturday, there are roadworks on the motorway, and the car is wet and needs scraping. At 5:11 you're parking. Olle misses the warm-up.

This pattern repeats until something changes. Today we're adding Leave on time to FamilyBoard on iOS — the feature that looks at the map for you.

What it is

Open an event that has a location and starts within the next seven days. Right inside the event, you'll now see a new card:

"Leave 12:20 — 25 min · 4 km"

That's it. The time is calculated backwards from the event's start using current traffic. If the event is already underway — say you've just realised your work shift started 20 minutes ago — you'll see something different:

"Travel time: 25 min · if you leave now"

No bouncy animation, no shouting push notification. Just the numbers you need, exactly where you're already looking.

Why we built it now

We talked to two groups last autumn: shift workers (nursing, warehouse, restaurant) and parents with three or more kids on activities. Both said the same thing — it isn't the planning that wears you out, it's the transitions. When you're in the middle of one thing and have to switch to another, your brain doesn't have the capacity to compute "okay, 4 km on a Friday afternoon, that's 18 minutes plus parking plus a kid who can't find her swim cap".

Leave-by reminders do that maths for you. It isn't AI, it's just map plus calendar plus clock — wired together the way they should have been all along.

How it works

Three Apple APIs do the work:

1. MKLocalSearch for resolving the location. We picked it over CLGeocoder because it's much more forgiving for things like "Helsingborgs lasarett" or "Tellusgatan preschool" — POI names without a street address. CLGeocoder wants a street and city; MapKit's search understands places.
2. MKDirections for the route and travel time, with live traffic when the event is within seven days.
3. CoreLocation for where you are right now. We wait at most 8 seconds for a GPS fix — beyond that we'd rather show nothing than a wrong number.

Results are cached for 10 minutes per event. Open the same event again within the quarter-hour and you skip both the GPS hunt and a fresh API call.

Privacy

Your location never leaves the phone. The whole calculation runs locally in the app — we don't send coordinates to our servers, we don't store where you've been, we don't track your movement between events. Apple prompts you for location permission the first time you open an event with an address, and you can revoke it any time under Settings → Privacy.

Trade-offs we made on purpose

iOS only for now. The feature needs MapKit, which isn't a web API. If and when we pick up a Mapbox key, the same card comes to the web version — but we don't want to rush it and ship worse data than Apple gives us natively.

Driving routes only in v1. Public transport comes in the next update. We built driving first because 80% of the parents we spoke to drive their kids to activities.

No "navigate me there" button on the card. Tapping the address opens Apple Maps as it always has. We don't want to stand between you and the maps app you already know.

Try it

Update FamilyBoard via TestFlight. Open an event with an address that's within a week. The card is there.

This is one of the features we're most proud of this year — because it solves a concrete parenting problem without adding more noise to your life. Just two lines of text, exactly when you need them.