Issues with location feature
 

I'm playing with the location feature to see how I might incorporate it in a useful way and thus far I am not getting any results that I would find helpful. First, I tried to set my Home context to current location, and search on location tells me I am "here". I can then launch the app 5 minutes later and OF tells me that "Home is anywhere from 2-6 miles away. If I click on the map, I get a green pin where OF thinks I am (2-6 miles away), a red pin where OF thinks Home is, and the blue pin fairly close to the red pin. Why does OF think I am 2-6 miles away from where I actually am?

Also, I have set up a context for "DIY Store" that I want to be for either Lowe's or Home Depot. If I set up the location to search for "Lowe's", OF correctly identifies a Lowe's that is 6 miles away. If I set up the search for "Lowe's" OR "Home Depot", using OR as was suggested in another thread, I get the closest Home Depot that is 20+ miles away and the Lowe's that is 6 miles away is ignored. Any suggestions?

Do you have WiFi turned on? Location Services, the part of the iPhone OS that tells OmniFocus where the phone is, is able to much more closely determine your location if WiFi is enabled. Without WiFi turned on, the phone is seeing which cell towers it can talk to, how strong the signal from each is, and picking a location that matches.

Since cell towers have a fairly large area they can talk to, Location Services can't be as sure about where you're located. Since WiFi has much smaller range, if the phone can see a given wireless network, it can make a much more precise assumption about where you're located.

Did you include the quote marks when you set up the search in OmniFocus? When it comes to business searching, we're submitting the text you specify to a Google business search. When I headed over to maps.google.com and submitted the following two searches, they returned very different results:
"Lowe's" OR "Home Depot" 98119
vs.
Lowe's OR Home Depot 98119
(98119 is the zip code our offices are located in.)

The search with quote marks is telling Google to look for businesses specifically named "Lowe's" - other text strings will be ignored. If the store you were looking for was entered into Google's database as 'lowes', it would be ignored from the first search but included in the latter.

Does any of that help?

Brian, thanks for the reply. I am using WiFi, and what confuses me when I am using Locations Services (LS) from OmniFocus (OF) is how OF loses track of where I am. I view by Context and OF says I am anywhere from "<1 mile" to 1-6 miles from home. When I am "miles" away, I click on the button that takes me to the map and I have 3 visible pins-a green pin where OF thinks I am, a red pin where OF correctly says "Home" is, and the blue pin from LS that is right on top of the red pin. I can go back to OF, repeat the process, and the map may say I'm 13 feet from Home. Repeat again, and OF may say I'm 4 miles from Home. I never see this behavior when using Google maps outside of OF. Searching for directions for a contact, as one example, always places my starting point correctly on the map.

The quotes in my search did fix my business searches-thanks!

Can you send me a private message that shows exactly what location information you have associated with the troublesome context?

PM sent along with a screen dump of the map on the iPhone that illustrates what I am seeing.

Response PM sent.

With the talk of updates to the iPhone and desktop applications, I hope that full GPS support of Location Services is added to the next version of the iPhone application.

I followed up with the dev team a bit after our conversation, and it looks like the GPS and Cell tower location systems aren't actually separate. We ask for the location, and the phone OS sends answers which (generally) get more accurate over time, as the various systems report back with more information. The OS also says "here's how accurate I think this location is".

The problem you're running into is because the method that's fastest to respond - cell tower triangulation, in your neighborhood - isn't the most accurate due to the strength of the cell signal.

The developer I discussed this with theorized that we just need to check back with location services and update the map views once we saw a more accurate location guess come back.

We need to change the way the existing feature works, in other words, rather than add something that isn't there. That's in the development database, but it's not something that I can quote you a specific release on.