We’ve all been there, in a meeting with around 20 other people, the boss is at the end of the table talking and “Who Let The Dogs Out” starts playing at 1000 decibels from someone’s phone. Or you’re sitting in Church and the pastor is giving a great sermon and then AC/DC starts cranking “You Shook Me All Night Long”. Locale is an application who wants to fix these problems. The front page of their website has the following text:
So we invented Locale. Problem solved.
Locale is an application which uses your GPS, accelerometer, cell signal, wi-fi signal, and others to apply a complicated geofencing alogorithm. Now, that sounds pretty complicated…and truth be told it is. But to make it simple, it knows where you are and you tell it what to do or not do at that location. So, each time you are at that location, that action does happen (or doesn’t if that’s your preference). So now when you are at church or at the office, your ringer is on silent without you having to do anything. Pretty cool.
Now, Locale goes beyond just silencing your ringer. You could switch profiles automatically and now your wallpaper is a nice corporate image instead of the one with you and your buddies in Vegas. Locale could also be used to turn off wi-fi and bluetooth if your battery level dips down to a certain level. And of course, if you always want to know when a certain person calls, they can be added to the VIP list for a certain condition and always ring through.
The basic functions of Locale are nice, but it also has a plug in architecture which give more functionality. Currently there are over 300 plugins in the Google Market for Locale.
Locale was the winner of the Android Developer Challenge and it deserved it completely. A nice app which solves a problem in a simple and effective way. At $4.99 it’s a little more than a lot of Android apps but it’s a bargain if it saves just one embarrassing ring.
