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?

Calling this a true “driving” condition would be a misnomer, as a number of other factors would actually be used to guess that the user was driving. This request would simply detect the speed at which the phone is moving.

There are two ways currently to detect when the phone is in a car: a car dock condition or a Bluetooth condition, both of which are available now as plug-ins on the Android Market.

We’ve been investigating an implementation for a “speed” condition, and we’re confident we can create a reliable and low-power consumption implementation. There are just a number of considerations to take into account before doing so. After reading all of the comments, it appears that there are several different goals that users have in mind. Let’s look at a few of them:

1. Power savings: some users want to enable Bluetooth in the car and disable Bluetooth everywhere else. Unfortunately a speed condition would consume far more power than Bluetooth, so users are much better off simply leaving Bluetooth on all the time. Scratch this one off the list.

2. Safety/regulatory: some users want to turn the ringer off while driving, due to distracted driving safety and regulatory considerations. For this, there are some considerations:

First, how quickly would users expect Locale to detect a change in speed? The more quickly Locale detects a change in speed, the greater the impact on battery life. If the “speed” condition drains the battery in 4 hours, it doesn’t do anyone any good. Based on our research, there may be up to a 10 minute delay before speed changes can be detected. Would such a delay reduce the usefulness of a speed condition?

What about the reverse? How quickly would users expect the driving condition to deactivate once they stopped driving? Would it be annoying that you wouldn’t receive phone calls for 10+ minutes after you got out of the car? And how would users expect this condition to behave in bumper-to-bumper traffic? If the phone is moving at a slow speed for a long period of time, the speed condition might deactivate.

3. Finally, there are probably some other creative uses for a speed condition besides just to detect driving… Let’s hear them!

AUTOMATIC BACKUP/RESTORE
Locale has automatic backup and restore using the cloud-based backup mechanism in Android 2.2 or later. There are no configuration options within Locale—it just works!

To use this feature, simply make sure that backup/restore is enabled by going to the Android Settings and verifying that Backup and Restore is enabled. (This option might be in a different place on different devices. With Android 2.2, it can be found under Android settings → Privacy. With Android 4.0, it can be found under Android settings → Backup & reset). Whenever Locale is uninstalled and reinstalled, the device is factory reset, or you upgrade to a new device, your Locale situations will be automatically restored. If there are no options for backup and restore under the Android Settings, then the device does not support automatic backup and restore.

Since backups are tried to a Google account, be sure to always use the same Google account when setting up your Android devices.

If you’ve ever previously installed a pirated copy of Locale, automatic backup and restore will not work correctly.

MANUAL BACKUP/RESTORE USING ADB
For Android 4.0 and later, the Android developer tools can perform a backup to a desktop computer:

1. Install the Android developer tools http://developer.android.com/sdk/tools-notes.html
2. Enable USB debugging on your device
3. Create a backup called locale.apk in your computer terminal’s current working directory: adb backup -f locale.bak com.twofortyfouram.locale
4. Restore a backup from your computer terminal’s current working directory: adb restore locale.bak

MANUAL BACKUP/RESTORE TO EXTERNAL STORAGE
Locale contains a beta manual backup/restore feature to create a manual backup to external storage. (“External storage” does not necessarily mean the SD card. The definition of external storage varies from device to device.) Because Locale already has cloud-based backup and restore, most users should have no reason to worry about manual backup and restore.

Locale’s manual backup and restore is primarily meant for support and diagnostic purposes and is disabled by default. To enable manual backups, please follow the instructions below.

1. Allow installing apps outside of the Android Market
a. From the Home screen, go to the “Settings” app
b. For Android 1.5 through Android 3.2: Choose “Applications” and make sure that “Unknown sources” is checked. For Android 4.0: Choose “Security” and make sure that “Unknown sources” is checked

2. Install Backup Enabler
a. Open the web browser on your phone
b. Go to this address: www.twofortyfouram.com/backup.apk
c. Once the download completes, tap on the download
d. Follow the instructions to install

After manual backups are enabled, a new Backup menu item will appear under the menu of the Locale situation list screen. From that menu item, you can create a backup to external storage. When Locale is re-installed, it will automatically detect any existing backups and ask whether you’d like to restore them. Manual backups are an unsupported beta feature.

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…