PaulC's dashboard

I think having reQall try to automatically determine what categories a given 'Place' might fall into is doomed to failure. It's never going to be 100% right, and that's more frustrating than helpful. I'd be more happy if I could create my own categories (thereby addressing both cultural naming differences and personal preferences) and be able to assign one or more categories to a 'Place', and a single category to an item. In essence, a category could be used as a 'Meta-Place', which can be used to group 'Places' by 'things you could buy there', 'things you could do there', etc. E.g. some supermarkets have pharmacies, many do not. I might want to assign 'grocery' and 'pharmacy' to a given store.

I posted a related suggestion where Google Maps (or a similar POI database) could be used to find nearby locations of a given chain of stores. See: "One 'place', multiple locations - deduce automatically". The kind of info in POI databases is somewhat crude, and aimed at GPS navigation devices - but it is one way to get automatic categories. My preference would be to use that info to pre-populate the categories when a 'Place' is created, but then be able to freely edit it afterwards. That way it works OK with minimal user involvement, but if a user wants to invest the time, they can make it work exactly the way they want.

Besides Google Maps, geonames.org is a useful geocoding/POI resource, and it even integrates the GPS-encoded articles in Wikipedia. openstreetmap.org is interesting, too.

p.s. By the way, I'm English, but have lived in Silicon Valley for quite a while. So I guess I'm 'bi-cultural' ;) (maybe even tri-cultural, if geek culture counts :) – PaulC, on July 18, 2009 20:08

I'd like to be able to add a 'Place' which has more than one physical location. For example: Safeways, Longs, Home Depot, Barnes & Noble, etc.

I'll visit whichever store from that chain is convenient, based on what other errands I'm going to run.

Perhaps the suggestion isn't clear in everyone's mind.

Yes, it's already easy to create a 'Place' that corresponds to a particular store, and even associate it with GPS co-ordinates. Yes, you can associate an item to purchase with a specific 'Place'.

The suggestion relates to items you could purchase at more than one place. Say I have two grocery stores and a drug store each set up as a 'Place'. I need to get milk, which I could get at any of them. Here's a situation where assigning to one 'Place' is too specific. If I had a way to say 'buy milk at a grocery store' that one item could appear on the shopping list for all three of the places, and I could mark 'done' whenever I visit one of them.

If a 'place' is a specific store, then being able to associate categories with places, and items with categories, allows you to be specific with items only available at one store, and be general when something can be found in any one of a category of stores. – PaulC, on July 18, 2009 08:22

I think the Pro price is fair for what's provided. Today's implementation of reQall is great at the 'capture' aspect, they've done a great job of making it darn near frictionless.

Though in my opinion, there's much that could be done to improve the 'organize/prioritize' aspect, particularly if you compare it with other offerings out there.

That aspect has me on the fence about committing to reQall. What it does, it does very well. though I wish it offered more for the 'organize' aspect. I suspect if I were to capture everything I'd like to track, it'd become unwieldy very quickly.

If my life were simple, I wouldn't need help tracking everything that's going on...

In addition, I may want to disable access from numbers I don't have configured in my account, even if I have a PIN configured. If I know I'm never going to call from numbers other than the ones I have listed, it's more secure.

Though this would be more useful if reQall allowed the same number to be added to multiple accounts (but require a PIN if so).

BTW my employer insists on sending the main switchboard number as the caller ID for all outgoing numbers, so it's not just the 'family home phone' scenario where this comes up.

Allowing a number to be used in multiple accounts, but requiring a PIN for that number, would be useful.

I appreciate that doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the current implementation (why add the common number to your account at all?), but elsewhere I made a request to enable/disable the PIN requirement per number, and as part of that, disable PIN use for calls from numbers not listed on the account.

I'd like to be able to associate the 'from' address of an incoming email with a default place, too.

For example, if I send an item from my work email address, I'd like to be able to configure reQall to tag it with my 'work' place automatically.