Q & A

Thanks everyone for the kind words. I am planning on making this app happen, I've certainly not given up. I resubmitted the app last night around 11 PM Pacific time. Hopefully apple will get back to me before the end of today with a response.

I want to answer some questions asked in the comments recently.

Q: do you sign in to it like you would on the Twitter or Facebook clients (which are in the app store now)?

A: Currently you use the web interface to sign in to geocaching.com. For obvious reasons I may have to change that, but to get the information you will need to be signed in, either though my app or geocaching.com via the web. (Unfortunately cookies aren't shared between safari and applications, so you have to sign in separately with both. Which means with the latest changes you definitely want to check the "remember" checkbox when signing in!)

Q: Out of curiosity will you be able to look at a map (perhaps google maps on geocache.com) and be able to view all unfound surrounding caches as if you were using a query?

A: I do have links set up and ready to go for looking at the map view of geocaching.com. I played with that some and unfortunately I can't actually GET data from the web view or safari. So while I can provide a one-way interface
to get to the maps version of geocaching.com, it's not really useful -- you can't get the data entered easily. I do want to do something here, so I'll keep playing around with it. On my desktop machine I almost exclusively use the map view to find nearby caches, so I understand the appeal.

Q: I have one question though, as I do not have a 3G iPhone would I still be able to use the software as an offline tool for paperless caching, e.g. load my gpx file into the software and then use it to get cache descriptions, hints, etc. while using my GPSr to find the cache.

A: GPX support is interesting. I am working on a way to get GPX files directly from geocaching.com (assuming you are logged in), but I haven't gotten that down yet. I am fairly new to web programming, so I'll need to brush up a bit on some javascript to do more there.

As far as offline caching. That is planned, however it is not done yet. That was going to be for the non-lite geopher version. I'll have more details as that gets closer. I do plan on supporting an offline mode, and being able to sue that on a touch or any iPhone. Geocaching and GPS use in general tends to happen out of service ranges as often as in service range, and it would be silly to limit the app to online only.

Q: I take it geocaching.com doesn't have an API to allow more direct integration with your data for recording logs etc?

A: Geocaching.com has no public API that I am aware of, other than the POST codes that I've been able to glean from general usage of the site. In the non-lite version of Geopher I was planning on not ever seeing a web page -- you would just use the app and be able to log caches, manage cache lists, etc all from within the application, oOnline or offline. I have plans to contact groundspeak about this once I start developing this more -- until the lite version is approved (which uses groundspeak's web interface instead of it's own) I've held off. I don't want to do a bunch of development and have apple deny me. Again. ;)

Thanks again for the support everyone.

I'll post again when I hear back from apple, hopefully later today.