Thursday, December 18, 2008

Merry Christmas!

Hey all.

I hope you're having fun geocaching out there! I've taken a couple weeks haitus on working on Geopher Lite, but I am now back at it. The dust is settling on a new addition to our family, hopefully after Christmas things settle into a real routine so I can make some real headway on the full version.

Quick update, for the moment I'm abandoning in place the web archiving. I've sunk a ton of time into this and it's not getting me the results I would like. There's still hope for this feature, and I'm seriously thinking of putting it into a beta state like I did the compass rotation. Drop me a line if you're interested in this if I get more than one or two people responding I'll stick what I have into the next release as a beta feature.

I've done some testing with the new 2.2 APIs for compass rotation and the results have been less than stellar. I'll be doing some more testing with this and see if I can polish up the compass rotation as I find the time. It's still less than ideal and a bit less accurate than I'd like it to be.

Speaking of the compass, I am working with another app developer (The guy who has done the free Geocaching Toolkit) on a newly released app called Geocaching Buddy. The author has added support via URL linking to Geopher Lite for the compass rotation! I'm pleased and honored that he would do such a thing and I am working to improve The URL linking to be even better. He has also graciously given me a copy of the application. I'm looking forward to trying it out on my next multi-cache. There's been a lot of thought and work that has gone into this app and I'm excited to put it to use.

I've received little to no feedback in the past 6 weeks or so (other than spam from t-mobile wanting me to develop for their app store as well as adMob spam), with one notable exception. I had one user ask about textmarks via coord.info, and I thought I'd let you all know I am looking at this for the full version of Geopher Lite. I had originally planed on simply filling out notes and a link to the log page forwarded to the mail application for final submission later, but this would allow more on the fly entry of such things. If anyone uses this system (or would like to) I'd love to hear your feedback on how you'd like to use it.

I would also appreciate any feedback about what you do and don't like with Geopher Lite in regards to other Geocaching applications for the iPhone. My original plan of what I had envisioned really isn't realized yet. TO be clear, from some of the integrated options I have looked at are very tech-oriented in GPS's. What I'd like to do is go the other way some and simply focus on geocaching and making that as easy and as fun as possible. Cross your fingers, it's time to re-dedicate myself to this languishing project.

Thanks for your patience. As always feedback is encouraged and appreciated!

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DadGuy has been working with apple computers since the mac classic. I love games and puzzles and like to solve problems. I'm having a blast developing for the iPhone and iPad.