What is a location used for in iCal?

Greetings Ken,

The location field in iCal is meant for use with a CalDAV server which has locations defined for clients to access. If you aren't using a server which has locations defined you get the exclamation mark. You can still use the field and type in a location manually (and ignore the exclamation point): http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2513

If you are using Lion Server, talk to your server admin to have them define locations for your purposes:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Server/10.7/en/t_ResourcesLocations _gui.html

Cheers.

Hi Madison, thanks for this information. Does this mean that iCal will not have the support of knowing the location of appointments (i.e. "you are close to your 12.00 meeting. Take the next left turn"?).

That would be awesome....

iCal in Lion and earlier does not offer that feature.

Mountain Lion is coming out this summer and does have some new Calendaring / Reminder features so we'll have to see what the future holds: http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/features.html#reminders

Reminders under iOS 5 (for iPhones, iPads, etc.) does have something akin to what you describe: http://www.macworld.com/article/1164792/how_to_use_the_ios_reminders_app.html

Thanks a lot! The reminders feature is indeed quite useful. It'd be awesome if it had been integrated with the iCal one. One step at a time I guess....

Is the only solution here to ask Google to define the locations field as a locations field in their CalDAV server? If so, what is the best way to provide this feedback to Google?

I found this Google Group: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/calendar