Features needed: Locations for Contexts, or iPhone and sneakypeek 1.1
 

Attaching locations to contexts is great on iPhone, but there are some important improvements needed

0) OF for Mac should optionally be location-aware as well.
1) Need to allow multiple locations for a context. For example, there are multiple grocery stores in my area, I might want a "grocery store" context that recognizes all of them.
2) Need to be able to manage locations for contexts on my Mac and sync them with my iPhone, because typing on the iPhone is much more tedious
3) Should be able to use Address book for locations.

[QUOTE=wealthychef;41094]
1) Need to allow multiple locations for a context. For example, there are multiple grocery stores in my area, I might want a "grocery store" context that recognizes all of them.
[/QUOTE]

If you want to recognize _all of them_ the do Business Search on "grocery store" and assign that to your grocery store context. That solves the _all of them_ problem and that feature is already there in OF iPhone.

However, I would like to be able to search on multiple businesses on OF iPhone. For example, I'd rather not search on "Hardware Store", I'd prefer to search on "Home Depot", "Lowes", and "ACE". I don't want "Jim's Fancy Dancy Paint and Pony Supply House" showing up as a possibility because I really didn't like the way Jim painted my last pony.

As a loyal customer of "Jim's Fancy Dancy Paint and Pony Supply House", I must admit I'm surprised you don't want them showing up in your hardware store searches. But to each his own. :-)

Seriously, I agree with blewis. It would be nice to search only for specified businesses (plural). I've already run into that once. Right now you have two choices: (1) everything in a category or (2) only one specific business name.

-Dennis

blewis, I think this should work for you:

"home depot" OR lowes OR "ace hardware"

(It's important to enter "OR" in uppercase.)

[QUOTE=Andrew;41156]blewis, I think this should work for you:

"home depot" OR lowes OR "ace hardware"

(It's important to enter "OR" in uppercase.)[/QUOTE]

Nice! I think that did the trick! You're my new favorite! You can have the locations be really general or really specific. Cool.

I did get some seemingly strange behavior where I couldn't sense what location in my search equation was getting priority. For example, I typed A OR B OR C, and OF iPhone would choose location A, even though it was 10 miles further away than B. It got more weird when I swapped, say B OR A OR C. Location A still got picked (I think that showed the order wasn't important). For a while I thought it might be selecting based on how big the business was - i.e. suspected that big business shows up first in a search. Once I typed B OR C and I swear it started picking Z. I was like WTF YO! (how in the world could Fat Sound OR Sam Ash resolve to "Harry's Guitar Shop" - seriously).

I messed with the ordering for a bit more, and then it seemed to start picking the closest location, but didn't change from the original search string. Not sure how that sorted itself out. :-[ I think the Skyhook database has my work WiFI totally confused with some other one, so I blame that. I guess I need to get that 3G! :-]

On a final note, after my ramble, thanks for the tip!

[QUOTE=wealthychef;41094]Attaching locations to contexts is great on iPhone, but there are some important improvements needed
…[/QUOTE]

Be sure to use Help --> Send Feedback to get your requests in the bug tracking database.

Business Names in search?
 

I'm thinking I'll like the ability to do business searches on "grocery store" and the like, but it would be nice if I could see the business name, instead of just the street address when I click on the "<1 mile" button. I may not want to go to the Sam's Club when there's a Trader Joe's nearby, but "2342 W commercial lane" doesn't tell me what store google thinks is nearby.

Will the OR thing also work for addresses?
I have two shops (affiliates) which can't be found via business search (in the Netherlands).
The addresses can be found separately, but how to combine them with the OR operator?

triangle, I don't see a way to get multiple specific addresses to work, sorry.

Andrew, Thanks for your response, but...

This problem of not being able to enter multiple addresses makes to whole location feature mostly unusable (at least for me). Business search does not give the right results, that would not be a problem as long as I could enter multiple addresses.
For instance; hardware shops (like US home depot) do not get listed by business search. I could enter one address but then the nearby function would not give the right results when I'm at a different hardware shop. I'm not sure how this is in the US but in the Netherlands you have tens of shops in a 10 kilometer radius (yep kilometers ;-).

Can I somewhere officially request such a feature?