Location Reminders - task-based rather than Context-based?
 

Love that Location Reminders is included in latest release! I admit I haven't had a chance to try it out in practice. However, I'm kind of stuck setting up a Notification, and choosing between When Arriving and When Leaving. Wouldn't that be best left up to the Task itself rather than the Context?

"Reminder when I arrive home to defrost the roast."
"Reminder when I leave home to turn down the heat."

There also might be taske you don't want to be reminded about.

Is this something that can be considered for a future release? I'm kind of stuck in a decision loop now.

Thanks,
Dave

Good points, Dave - I'll get feature requests written up on those ideas, so the rest of the team knows about those. Thanks!

Clarifying: wrote up feature requests for per-action overrides to the defaults specified by the settings in the context. Folks aren't going to want to set up all the location settings for each and every action they want to be reminded of...

[QUOTE=dmcomeau;102832]
"Reminder when I arrive home to defrost the roast."
"Reminder when I leave home to turn down the heat."
[/QUOTE]

For the time being, you could set up a subcontext of Home: When Leaving for those actions you want notifications for when leaving, and then set up "when arriving" notifications for your original Home context.

I've been using subcontexts to simulate per task location reminders, but I want to second the vote on per task location reminders. I have a bunch of tasks in my GTD-style Errands context, but there is certainly no one location that all of my Errands can be assigned to. Likewise, I have a long list of items that I need to do in my Home context, but only one or two that I need to be reminded about when I get near the house, not "Change the A/C filter (and 21 more)".

Siri and Reminders are cool in that they got me looking back at how Omnifocus does location based actions, and I quickly remembered why I never adopted them. Putting location reminders on individual actions would be great.

I agree
 

I saw this feature, got excited, but quickly found out how difficult this would be to implement for reasons already explained. I don't want to clutter up my contexts with 'Home (arrive)' and another one called 'Home (leave)'. I haven't used it for this reason.

I really would like to use this because I think Apple missed the boat with iOS 5 on their reminders app. The reminders.app is lacking in that you can't put in an address or choose a location from a map, and have to use a contact (which I find very unintuitive). I think OmniFocus has a really good chance at making this the way that it should be.

+1 vote for location settings (arrive and leave) be task (not context) dependent.

Added both requests since my last post to the dev database. Thanks, folks!

Hi Brian, add my vote too, please.

My vote too please. Just tried to set up individual action location reminders and stumbled over the context restriction. Both options are definitely needed.

Added. Thanks, everyone.

One additional enhancement regarding location reminders: the ability to either assign multiple locations to a context or allow child contexts to percolate a location notification to the parent context. For example, I add some grocery actions to a Safeway context. There are three Safeway's within a 5km radius of where I live. It'd be nice to be notified of the Safeway actions regardless of which Safeway I was approaching.

[QUOTE=dmcomeau;102832]I'm kind of stuck setting up a Notification, and choosing between When Arriving and When Leaving. Wouldn't that be best left up to the Task itself rather than the Context?

"Reminder when I arrive home to defrost the roast."
"Reminder when I leave home to turn down the heat."

There also might be taske you don't want to be reminded about.
[/QUOTE]

I'm a little puzzled here. The notification won't fire until you've left the context. It'll be too late to turn down the heat. (Unless you have home automation hooked up to your iPhone!) In other words, these leaving notifications seem most useful for things you *can't* do at home. So wouldn't you want a separate Errands context or something, anyways?

I too would like to see these reminders associated with individual actions instead of whole contexts.

It would also be great if they could be set, edited, etc. in the desktop version (knowing they would only work on iOS 5 devices of course).

I don't like the idea of complicating my context hierarchy just to accomplish this as it seems like a hack and also violates the "only as complicated as it needs to be" principle of GTD (something that's already a little too easy to do in OF I think).

Thanks

Added your posts to the appropriate items in the dev database, RogueishSmurf and jguice. Thanks!

I'm obviously the odd one out: I [I]have[/I] set up contexts for "Home: Arriving", "Home: Leaving", "Work: Arriving" and "Work: Leaving". These work wonderfully for me, except one little niggle.

My little niggle is simply that the notifications show up on the lock screen: wonderful! So I unlock one of the 42-odd notifications, and OmniFocus is opened … to where I last closed it. What was that notification again? Which context was notification #22 based in?

As an example, I arrived home last night at which point OmniFocus displayed the alert for "RSVP To Maker BBQ at Hackerspace" (the invite is at home, so I just need to be reminded to RSVP when I get home) - this was in "Home:Arriving" which is a context set up with an "entering" geofence. Alongside that was a reminder to start recording the last episode of Spicks and Specks - this was in "Home" with a due time.

Before I left work, I had been looking at the "Work:Project X" context.

So when I unlocked the phone by sliding over the "RSVP to Maker BBQ" reminder, OmniFocus opened up to the "Work:Project X" context.

If I have multiple items in a geofenced context, I'd like to get only one reminder about the tasks in that context. For any notification, it would be nice if activating OmniFocus through that notification would bring me to the appropriate context for that action.

So if I swipe-to-unlock on a notification generated by the Home:Arriving geofence, I'd like to have OmniFocus opened up viewing the "Home:Arriving" context.

If I swipe-to-unlock on a notification generated by an alarm on an action, I could care less what view/mode OmniFocus is open in, as long as that action was visible. Ideally, there would be a separate "perspective" for "recently notified actions" which grouped the actions by context or project depending on my preferences.

PS: for clarity, the "Leaving" contexts are for stuff I have to do as general errands. If I wanted to remind myself to pick up stuff for dinner, I'd put that in the "Work: Leaving" context. If I wanted to remind myself to recharge my bus ticket today, that would go on Home: Leaving (since I'd be travelling by bus, and the reminder would come up as I'm heading out to the bus stop).

I have things like "check that oven is turned off" and "check that iron is unplugged" in a checklist (using Simplist), which is also where I store my Daily/Weekly/Monthly reviews. I have a recurring action in OmniFocus to run through these checklists, with the "morning exit" checklist reminder going off every morning.

[QUOTE=Grail;104798]So if I swipe-to-unlock on a notification generated by the Home:Arriving geofence, I'd like to have OmniFocus opened up viewing the "Home:Arriving" context.

If I swipe-to-unlock on a notification generated by an alarm on an action, I could care less what view/mode OmniFocus is open in, as long as that action was visible. Ideally, there would be a separate "perspective" for "recently notified actions" which grouped the actions by context or project depending on my preferences.
[/QUOTE]

Feature requests written up: thanks!

This. I have a few contexts locations that are a Google search. e.g. "Hardware" searches for the closest Home Depot or Lowes. "Grocery" searches for the closest Safeway, King Sooper, Walmart, etc. It would be great if I could be notified if there's anything available in my grocery list (e.g milk) when I'm within say 500 feet of my "Grocery" context search.

Possible??

[QUOTE=RoguishSmurf;103076]One additional enhancement regarding location reminders: the ability to either assign multiple locations to a context or allow child contexts to percolate a location notification to the parent context. For example, I add some grocery actions to a Safeway context. There are three Safeway's within a 5km radius of where I live. It'd be nice to be notified of the Safeway actions regardless of which Safeway I was approaching.[/QUOTE]

That would be nice, wouldn't it? It's a bit expensive to do, compared to what is offered now. Instead of just having a fixed set of targets whose proximity needs to be monitored, OmniFocus would have to frequently recompute the set of targets to be monitored as it noticed you moving around. In areas where cells are larger, it might not be as quick to notice that your position has changed, assuming that it is using the cell handoff instead of GPS receiver to cut power consumption. And of course if you head into an area without cellular data coverage, it may not work at all, whereas it might still work for the fixed targets (whose identity is already known), assuming location services drops back to using the GPS receiver.