It’s always interesting to hear the usage scenarios people have for Locale!

Locale’s UI doesn’t handle your particular use case very well, as Locale’s UI was optimized for the most common usage scenario. Consider a recent study http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7196/abs/nature06958.html where researchers followed the movements of 100,000 mobile phone users based on cellular tower positioning and discovered that people devote most of their time to just a few locations. Nearly 3/4 of the study’s subjects stayed within a 20-mile radius over a 6-month period. There was a significant degree of periodicity in these movements, such as going between home and work on a daily basis. Simply put, the majority of users are interested in a few locations that are relatively close together.

In terms of improving the Locale UI for your use-case, let’s look at the options:

a. Locale doesn’t know anything about what the user is typing in; it simply hands the query off to Android’s Geocoder and gets a coordinate back. Having Locale parse this isn’t going to be a good idea, especially once you start thinking about international addresses, etc. as we’d have to completely re-implement the Geocoder ourselves.

c. Locale uses the Android system-wide search UI facilities and these only provide a single input field. Adding multiple fields wouldn’t be possible.

I don’t think any of these adequately solve the problem, while keeping the UI design simply for the majority of users. So we’ll have to think more about how exactly this could be implemented…