2026 · Personal · Entrepreneurial
LeaveNow
An iOS app that tells you exactly when to leave for your next calendar event — accounting for real traffic, your travel mode, and how your day connects — so you're never late and never leave stupidly early.
Context
Every day involves some version of the same mental math: I have a 2pm meeting across town — when do I actually need to leave? Doing that well means knowing the drive time, checking current traffic, adding a buffer for parking or a stop, and remembering to check back in twenty minutes when the traffic changes. Calendar apps tell you what’s next, not when to move.
Problem
I was running that calculation myself, several times a day, and re-litigating it every time a meeting ran long or traffic shifted underneath me. A flat “remind me 15 minutes before” doesn’t know anything about distance or conditions, and nothing was looking across back-to-back events to warn me the drive between them simply wasn’t going to fit.
Approach
LeaveNow is a native SwiftUI app built around a DeparturePlanner that pulls events from Google Calendar, geocodes each location, and requests a route for the time I’d actually be leaving — not the current moment — iterating until the recommended departure time reflects the traffic I’ll actually hit. MultiEventPlanner and RouteComparisonEngine sit on top of that core plan to catch sequential-event conflicts and flag when a different travel mode would get me there meaningfully sooner. The plan feeds a “leave in X minutes” card that updates continuously on the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island through a Live Activity, backed by an escalating set of local notifications scaled to how much buffer I gave myself. Underneath, the app is protocol-oriented — location, calendar, routing, geocoding, and auth are each defined as a protocol with a real and a mock implementation, so the planning logic can be built and tested without a live account or a real API call — and it’s built to degrade gracefully: no routing key, no sign-in, or a failed geocode never blocks the app, they just fall back quietly and keep working.
Result
It’s in daily use on my own phone now, and it’s replaced a small but constant tax I was paying without noticing — watching the clock, guessing traffic, second-guessing whether “ten more minutes” was still true. The leave-by time sits on my Lock Screen, updates itself, and gives me an honest early warning on the days when back-to-back meetings genuinely aren’t going to work as scheduled. One tap opens Google Maps with the destination and travel mode already set.