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Tidying up location contacts for Siri and Reminders

My personal address book has no shame. I have contacts for people I haven't spoken to in years, contacts for people who I met at tech conferences, contacts for schools, for local stores, for repairmen, and so forth. It's one big old happy jumbled mess.

I'm cool with that.

When I want Siri and Reminders to be able to trigger a location-based event, I just throw it into my address book where it joins the hundreds of other often sad and neglected entries.

I believe this makes makes me a type "N" on Myers Brigg or something like that.

Not everyone will be happy with this kind of unstructured approach and an overflowing address book, or this kind of lack of organization.

If you want to be able to to set location reminders without messing up your address book, TUAW reader Will Herbert has a solution. On your Mac, launch the Address Book application and create two new groups. Call one Contacts and the other Locations.

Drag all your normal contacts into the Contacts group and create a set of location-only contacts in the other. Add stores, offices, dry cleaners, supermarkets, and so forth. These are all places that you don't necessarily want in your day-to-day contacts list.

Each of these is still available in the address book and therefore still available to Siri and Reminders. At the same time, they won't clutter up your standard contacts.

Score one for the Felixes of the world. The rest of us Oscars will trudge on as we were.



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iOS

My personal address book has no shame. I have contacts for people I haven't spoken to in years, contacts for people who I met at tech...
 

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chiller1699

I'm not sure how well this would work for Siri, but I've added multiple addresses under my contact info with custom labels for places I might go to often (e.g., home, work, parents, sister). When I set up a location-based reminder, all of those options are readily available without having to select "Choose Address". Of course, this may add information to your contact card that wouldn't want to share.

October 28 2011 at 2:02 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
TheMarque

A good solution is to use the Find my Friends app. When you visit a location, you can set a custom name for it such as "Work", "home", "school", or even something like "Walmart". Siri will then use the locations you set in the "Find my friend" app for the location based reminders. I dont even have any location contacts set up and this works perfectly like this.

October 28 2011 at 11:46 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
xxp84

Good solution! What I've been doing (I don't have Siri, still on an iPhone 4 for now) is putting the handful of locations that I want to use for reminders, such as the grocery store, etc. as multiple addresses of one "person" named Zzzzzz Reminder Addresses or something. This way it is only one entry but it sorts all the way to the bottom. When adding a reminder you can choose from among all the "person's" addresses.

With Siri, I'm sure my way would suck because I'd have no way to tell Siri which one of the "home" addresses of Mr. Zzzzz I mean.

October 27 2011 at 7:16 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Khalid AlHokail

Is there a way to setup a location reminder with a location that doesn't have an address? I tried adding the longitude and latitude coordinates but iPhone keeps on appending the country name making it impossible to locate.

October 25 2011 at 1:34 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Trevor

In addition, I also put Reminders- in the first name field..

October 24 2011 at 8:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
jollyllama

While setting up a "locations" group is technically a solution, this is a hack until Apple figures out a good way to reference a location that's not in my address book.

October 24 2011 at 8:20 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to jollyllama's comment
Brady Michael La

Until Apple figures a way to implement a method for Siri to recognize that you want to enter a one-off address instead of a stored contact, I can promise you that the current iteration is exactly how they intended it to be.

October 25 2011 at 12:05 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Brady Michael La's comment
jollyllama

It's not a Siri issue, it's a general issue with how the Reminders deals with locations.

October 25 2011 at 2:02 AM Report abuse rate up rate down
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