I work with apps focused on a specific tourist destination. - Some features might be appropriate to users out of the area who are planning a vacation in advance. - Other features might be appropriate to users in the area who are currently here on vacation. - Some features might be overlapping in appeal, others mutually exclusive. It would be neat to have a Location Aware app that might activate certain features, pages, or menus based on the users current location. For example, when viewing from far outside the area, a potential visitor might be offered one set of incentives (discounts, deals, whatever). When they are local, actually on their vacation, they might be able to view a different set of incentives (like a short term today only deal for a local service). Not sure how such a thing would be implemented, but I bet there's a team of code ninjas that might like to give it a go sometime down the road. No hurry, and no critical need or anything, just something to throw up on the bulletin board for a rainy day.

I'm asleep already, laughing. If I didn't know better, your a teammate posing as R2D2. You and / or Darth were in our last board meeting, right? The implementation works like this: a) You draw a square on map by pin-pointing 4 locations - North/West, North/East, South/West, South/East. Everything 'inside' the square created by these four points is considered 'on' everything outside is 'off'. The square's could be large, small, medium, micro. Large may be a country or region. Medium may be a city, small may be a local area. Micro may be in a building or at a park. So, create one or a hundred 'sqaures' or 'areas' in a list. App features (screens, menu items, buttons) are connected to squares. b) When the app is 'inside' a square (it could be in many, or none at the same time) then Menu X magically refreshes and shows the appropriate, potentially totally different items or just additional items. When an item is tapped, it knows it's gotta be in the square so it double checks if it still is when it's tapped. Stale data could allow a user to tap for a 'special' when their actually hundreds of miles away because they could not / did not refresh recently. So... menu item knows this and doesn't allow it. c) Inside the square could trigger lots and lots of things. Additional menu items are the simplest, many other things are more exciting, some even scary powerul. Like, for example: alert me when John is within 5 miles of my house or when 500 people are in my theme park, let me know so I can call for help - you get the idea. Where are we with this - um - already have it figured out and engieered. Not in conrol panels for tons of reasons. Privacy is one. Overwhelming our barely understanding this audience is another. Baby steps ;-)

Don't worry, I'm not a masquerading colleague. But if R2D2 and Vader were in your last board meeting, I might want to be. R2D2 at least, but I'm not so sure about Vader. I think the last time they sat down together as at Lando's place for dinner, and that didn't work out so well. But he was serving up some of that smooth Colt 45, so it wasn't all bad. The map square is interesting if that's how you went about it. I'm more of a math guy than a coding guy, so I was thinking a circle. Pinpoint your central location of interest, then some simple trig to map coordinates tells you the user's distance from that point. Determine a radius of interest (like less than 50 miles) and there you have it. I bet the ninjas were pounding the keys hard to do that square thingy. ;) (Hears slap on forehead coming from coding office: Circle?!? We should have thought of that.) But maybe it's not like that. Square, Circle, Triangle, whatever works for you. It's mostly just here and there really. Cool to hear you are so far along with this. Thanks, Round Peg, Square Hole P.S. I did recently change my forum username and removed the location, because I wanted a little more anonymity from local prying eyes. The R2 avatar was uploaded on day 1 though, because R2D2 does most of my coding for me.