This is a great idea and we’ve been looking at it for quite a while. I agree it could be quite useful when combined with Astrid integration. For example, a location-aware reminder would be really useful a few minutes after arrival, rather than right when walking in the door.

A key requirement would be that the delay should be very consistent and predictable. For example, if I ask for a reminder 30 minutes after I get home, it should always be exactly 30 minutes after I get home. Thanks to Locale 2.0’s instant location, we are now be able to meet this requirement.

I have a few open questions about this as we go forward with investigating how this might work:

- Should there be delayed conditions? Or should this be implemented as delayed settings? (The end result would be the same, but each requires a different mental model) - How short or how long of a delay would people want?

UPDATE:

Locale 1.4 includes significant improvements to the location detection system, reducing time to detect location changes by 20% while also improving battery usage by up to 50%.

The original goal of this request—reducing the delay of detecting location changes—has been met as Locale 1.4 detects location changes within an average of 4 minutes. We are therefore marking this request as completed.

Although this request is being marked as completed, we have ongoing research and development to keep improving the speed and efficiency of the location detection system further :).

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(Original response)

By design, Locale has no user-configurable options. The goal is that Locale should “just work” without requiring users to fiddle with various options that could negatively impact the operation of the app. For example, asking Locale to check location every minute could cause the battery to drain within 2 hours at which point you might miss the train stop anyway.

Although a user-configurable option won’t be implemented, I see the underlying goal as improving how quickly Locale detects that location has changed. For Locale 1.3 and earlier, it can take up to 10 minutes for location changes to be detected.

I’m therefore repurposing this request for implementing improvements to the speed of the location detection system. Once these improvements are completed, a user-configurable update frequency will no longer be necessary.

The original request here was for a logical NOT operator, although it doesn’t make sense to create a logical NOT operator in Locale. Most of the time, NOT isn’t the right way of thinking about a Condition. For example, NOT 9 am to 5 pm could be redefined as 5pm to 9am. NOT at work would simply be the Default situation. For the other conditions built-in to Locale, thinking about the problem in a different way usually means that NOT isn’t needed. If a Condition truly needs NOT logic, then that should probably be put into the individual Condition’s UI itself rather than as part of the Edit Situation screen in Locale.

Although this request is for a NOT operator, I believe the underlying request here is a way of detecting the transition between situations. The strongest use case would be detecting when you’ve left a particular Location. While Locale can easily detect the transition between situations, providing a UI to allow the user to do something with that transition is extremely complex.

Today, Locale treats situations as a continuous event. When Locale determines that a situation is active, it applies that situation’s settings. When leaving a situation, a lower priority situation’s settings take precedence (usually the Defaults). This provides a single, consistent behavior that makes Locale easy to understand.

One suggested implementation is to have “On Enter” and “On Exit” settings within a situation. On Enter settings would work like the current settings within Locale, while On Exit would be applied when leaving a situation. But what if the On Exit settings of a situation are in conflict with the On Enter settings of a higher-priority situation? The number of arrangements that the user must think about has just doubled.

We’re still evaluating ways to solve the underlying requeste of “leaving a location”, without making the UI too complicated…