Flexible location search in Sherlock's movie channel

Jan 05, '05 10:01:00AM

Contributed by: representa

Well, if you're not sure what city and state you're in, you probably have more problems than Sherlock can help you with ... so for the rest of us, this hint is just for the "neat!" factor.

In any case, I was visiting my girlfriend and we were trying to pick a movie to go see. So she fired up Sherlock and a very odd thing happened: her name automagically appeared in the "Find Near" search field, and Sherlock pulled up a list of theaters in her hometown. I had never seen this happen before on my computer. Apparently, the "Find Near" field has always accepted names and addresses from the Address Book database. The fact that Address Book entries may be used is stated Sherlock's help file, but since it wasn't obvious to me, maybe it wasn't to other people.

A more interesting feature of the "Find Near" field is that the location doesn't have to be in the Address Book. For example, are you at Sea World? Type in "Sea World," and a list of theaters in the Sea World area appears. Want to find a theater for a movie after a game at Fenway Park or an exhibit at the National Gallery? Type those names in, and Sherlock will give you a list of theaters near those landmarks, too. Apparently, all Sherlock does is a zip code lookup, because it does not limit the results, in spite of your specificity. It would be nice if the results were a little more tailored to the exact location, or at least sorted by distance from the address, rather than alphabetical order. However, this is a problem with any ordinary address search in Sherlock, and not with the way it looks up the address of landmarks you enter.

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