Why would it drive you crazy? From what I understand (I've never used it), the Locale app is customizable. You specify what setting you want changed and under what circumstances. I actually use similar but more limited free application on my N1 called "Timeriffic". I have it set to turn off notifications (text messages, new emails, etc) automatically at night and turn them on the next morning. I leave the ringer on though for phone calls, because generally if someone calls me on my cell after 11pm it's probably important. :-)
For what it's worth, I have had my Android phone for ~17 months and to this date Locale is _still_ its killer app. I simply refuse to own any other phone until it can do the same.
I will certainly understand if iPhone/iPad multitasking arrives with some fairly severe limitations placed on the developers of background apps. Right now there's zero ability in that area so anything, even if severely limited, will still be an infinite improvement (depending on how you like to imagine your divide by zero operations playing out. ;)
It sure sounds nice in theory, but I'm paranoid enough about such things working that I'd end up manually turning off my ringer anyway. At least for a long time until I felt really comfortable with it... it is super sucky to be "that guy" at a wedding/funeral...
Do you really go to enough weddings or funerals in the same location that you'd be able to use something that keyed off GPS to change the ringer settings? I seriously hope you'd explicitly turn off the ringer in those cases.
:) Good point, but I was really just using those as hyperbole. A better example is that it can't know when I'm in a meeting or not (conference rooms in my building are interspersed with offices), so I've still gotta manually silence it during meetings... that's the most common use case for silencing for me (some aren't in this same situation, but many are), and location-based auto-silencing is useless for that.
So now the user has two things to keep in mind as far as silencing: which times it is programmed to do so automatically (all of which the user must be a bit suspicious of already - as you said, to be extra-sure the user would want to manually override even at those locations during times that it's really important for the ringer to be off) and which times they still have to manually override it. So we've got extra mental burden and anxiety for the user, partially or wholly overriding the savings of not having to worry about silencing in some circumstances. We're only trusting the system for those times where we'd really like it to work but it doesn't have to be guaranteed, so there's some lurking uneasiness during those times.
And the user has to program it. And I'd think it's very likely to be a significant battery drain since it's needing to turn on the GPS quite often to be useful. Etc etc.
Anyway, it's a super-cool sounding feature when just considered as a bullet-point, but it just strikes me as a "techno cool" feature (kind of like speech recognition and "Minority Report" interfaces) that I doubt I'll ever see widely used. I'm sure there are a few specific circumstances where it's really handy and I'm happy for those who enjoy it, but I have nearly no interest in it compared to a trusty manual switch and I think I'm speaking for the vast majority of users there. Could certainly be wrong.
