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Comment by JulianWasTaken | Hacker News Reader

It's cute. I've been using it for the past couple of weeks on a Nexus 4.

My opinion on it currently is that it looks promising but it's quite useless until there are finer controls on when and how cards appear (the controls there are now are really simplistic), and more importantly the ability to create my own cards, which would give me a reason to get back into SL4A.

As an example, the commute card that shows your distance from work/home is nice, but I have two jobs and commute home->work->work->home. I'm not sure I expect Now to figure that out quite yet, though it wouldn't be hard, but I do expect to be able to teach it that, which I can't currently do.

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The commute card would actually be useful if only it would show public transit departures I can make, as it is now whenever I see the card it mostly shows subway trains that have already departed or a few that I can not possibly make it to in time.

Clicking the card only takes me to Google Maps where I get tons of irrelevant suggestions. Not helpful.

I do love the idea though. I'm hoping it will improve!

It would also be nice to be able to tell it "I'm going to my girlfriends house after work". In that situation, telling me there's a traffic jam on my route home isn't useful information at all.

I also would love the ability (if it exists, I haven't seen it) to have it use geocoded reminders, like "remind me to get milk when I'm near the grocery store".

This is kind of hacky but...

If you're willing to schedule a Google Calendar event for wherever you want to go - and give it a location... Now will actually figure that out for you. It will tell you when to leave to get to that event (and forgo telling you the commute time to home).

You should be able to get the first by setting an appointment in your google calendar. It certainly gives me a heads up for traffic when I set things in there for destinations it recognises.

I'm actually surprised that location-based reminders aren't already part of Google Now. It seems like a really natural feature given everything else it already does.

I'd have to imagine that's something in the works. It likes to give me transit information heading to work or home, and seems to be fairly smart about it since I don't work a normal 9-5 schedule.

Have you tried onx?

https://www.onx.ms

I have not heard of that. Looks interesting, thanks!

I've found that Now has started automatically showing me the distance to my frequently visited places. I suspect this is because I've navigated to their location a few times on Google Maps, so Google knows this is a location I care about.

I'm guessing you've already set your home and work location in Google Maps? You could then also search for your other work location, and Now should automatically start prioritizing it later, especially if you pull up that card often.

By the way, you probably know this, but you can change how often different cards show up, and when they show up in the settings. For example, I've set weather to only show up in the morning and evening, so it doesn't clutter up my cards.

I've set home and work yeah. And I also toned down how often weather shows up.

Haven't tried navigating though. I'll give that a shot.

I've a question - are these cards programmable? As in, can we create our own cards and push notifications etc to these?

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