Re: [Orgmode] Does Org-mode need to be position aware?

[Sebastian Rose]

Hi Thorsten,


that's a great idea!


Torsten Wagner <address@hidden> writes:
> Dear All,
>
> I recently bought a Android-based phone and was pleased to see the
> mobileorg version for Android. As you all may know people tend away from
> static computer places and we have mobileorg and some of us even run
> emacs and org-mode natively on smartphones and other gadgets. More and
> more of this devices come with a build-in GPS or at least they get can
> get the current location by tracking the mobile phone towers.
>
> Playing around with Android for a few days, I saw many applications
> which make use of the fact that the location is known to them. E.g. they
> show restaurants, shops, or doctors praxis close to you.
>
> I start wondering whether org-mode should get aware of my location and
> whether people might be interested to add a location tag to org-mode tasks.
>
> In a similar way as we add status, priorities, dates, tags, etc. It
> might be interesting to add a location. A special agenda search could
> list only those entries associated with my current location (or within a
> given circle).
>
> Since GPS coordinates are somehow ugly and human unreadable, I thought
> it should be possible to mask them similar to links. E.g., like
> [[gps://35.71083783530009,139.8175048828125][Somewhere in Japan +3km]].
>
> Obviously, the first part has to be generated by read out the GPS
> location, the second part is a human readable description and a given
> radius. Closing this "link" would end up in "Somewhere in Japan +3km".
>
> A "C-a l" could compile an agenda list only showing those entries which
> intersect with my current location.

`C-a' is bound to `beginning-of-line'.

`C-c a l' is still free.


But wouldn't a property more suitable for the agenda? 

* TODO Something in Japan
  :PROPERTIES:
  :COORDS: gps://35.71083783530009,139.8175048828125
  :END:


The `+3km' could be a default setting (and could be supplied as a
filter, just like tags).


(Somehow I see the `org address book' discussion coming up again.  Emacs
needs an address book we all use.  Something that's delivered with
Emacs.)



Links could point to map.google.com.  I'd like to use those links to
store tracks in Org-files as well.  HTML-Export could support OSM or
Google-Maps to show the tracks.  We also could produce SVGs or PNGs from
the data.


> Obviously, it requires to read in GPS data, which might be tricky to do
> for all those different devices. Furthermore, it might need emacs-lisp
> code as well as some external program to read-out the position of the
> GPS module.


On Linux, BSD and MAC OS X there is `gpsd'.  I don't know how useful
it is --- I don't own a GPS yet.

http://gpsd.berlios.de/ states:

   gpsd is a service daemon that monitors one or more GPSes or AIS
   receivers attached to a host computer through serial or USB ports,
   making all data on the location/course/velocity of the sensors
   available to be queried on TCP port 2947 of the host computer. With
   gpsd, multiple location-aware client applications (such as
   navigational and wardriving software) can share access to receivers
   without contention or loss of data. Also, gpsd responds to queries
   with a format that is substantially easier to parse than the NMEA
   0183 emitted by most GPSes.

Is there something like it for other systems? Windows?
I think Cell phone systems should have something ...




> But I guess the emacs-lisp gurus here might know this much
> better then I do. Another issue comes to my mind for mobileorg users. As
> far as I know, mobileorg only fetches agenda views from a server but
> does not generate them. However, this would be necessary to create this
> kind of location aware agendas.
>
> Would be nice to hear other opinions. Makes this sens? Should it be part
> of mobileorg, or rather a independent package?


I'd make it an independent package.  Some laptops come with a built in
GPS these days.  And your desktop might know his GEO location as well.

We might have a variable `gps-home-coords' which is nice to have on cell
phones as well (would be great to have several "homes" for some people -
e.g. commuters).


Unfortunately I don't own a GPS yet.  But I'm very interested in this
one and surely will contribute.




Best wishes

   Sebastian