Limited time sale

Through the new year Geopher Lite is now free.

Happy holidays!

Groundspeak's new API

So groundspeak has their 3rd party API available. There isn't a lot of information about it out there other than "email us and we'll work with you".

Does anyone have any opinions about this API? On the one hand, if I were to use it, we could get rid of manually typing in cache details. On the other, it looks as though there are many restrictions on basic users. I hate to turn Geopher Lite basically into advertising for groundspeak's premium member services.

Thoughts?

(Also Wim, I haven't forgotten about GCBuddy compatibility. I got to the point where I'd pretty well have to restart my coding on that feature, so it's sat on the backburner for a while. I do plan on getting that working again, but it's not as simple as flipping a switch.)

2.0 released

Yep, I finally got off my duff and fixed the last few remaining issues, ignored the half-done GPX importer, and sent this into apple. I hope the last few of you still sticking around likes the update. As always feedback, good and bad, is appreciated!

Apologies...

The update has gone on far longer than I had planned. If you have been waiting for a release and not yet seen anything, feel free to drop me an email, I may be able to set you up with a beta version to play with.

Free Chirp?

Opencaching.com is giving away a chirp a day for each placed cache. There aren't a ton of active users on there right now, so your chances are pretty good if you cross-post a bunch of caches. Check out the rules and make sure your caches are marked as entries in the contest!

User Questions

I've taken what I have done with the iPad version of Geopher Lite and been working on what is essentially a rewrite of Geopher Lite, that is closer to the original vision I had of the full version. There are plenty of things on my list left to do.

You can see the results of my work here.

I have kept putting off my changes for Geopher Lite because to do what I wanted would essentially be a rewrite of the app. I do have changes, and I have made some improvements, but nothing I am satisfied with. I believe that I will only be comfortable with a full revamp.

I was also holding out hope that groundspeak would eventually open up more to 3rd party developers now that they are dominating the market for geocaching on the iPhone. I do know they are working on a 3rd party developer API, but it is invite only. Because I directly compete with them in the iPhone space I don't expect them to contact me. (Though I would love it if they would!)

I'm going to have to assume at this point that this won't happen. So where does that leave us?

I would like to take many of the changes I've made for the open caching port and put them into Geopher Lite. This will lose the skin support but should bring the app more into the modern iPhone world. For example, settings will be contained in the app itself. I will likely move forward with this and have an update submitted in the next few weeks.

As always, thanks for using Geopher Lite!

opencaching.com

A friend of mine tipped me off to this site this morning. It looks like Garmin is going to host their own geocaching site. I'm very interested to see where this is going.

I normally don't mention stuff like this here, but one of the big deals about this is that they have an open API to interact with. I do need to read the terms and conditions, but it's likely that Geopher Lite will be able to directly interact with the site. That's a big deal.

Work continues on the iPad version with a few features that will enhance the functionality quite a bit. Some exciting stuff, especially when combined with the above. I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, go create an account and check out this new player in the geocaching community.

As I suspected...

...not a peep about the iPad version. I'll probably polish up what I have and release it as a separate app in the app store. I've heard nothing other than what my friend has told me in basic usage on his iPad. If anyone would like to beta this version let me know.

The changes to the regular version are underway and I'm trying to decide if I should make the original a universal app or not. If anyone has an opinion on this, again, let me know.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Teaser

No official timeline, or even if I plan on releasing it officially, but a few weeks ago I sat down and got serious about an iPad port because a friend was bugging me about porting Geopher Lite to the iPad. I still do not have a 3G iPad, but I was able to get some stuff working. Rotation has been a headache and does not work yet as expected, but otherwise maps, coordinate entry and target screens appear to work fairly well other than that. (The map screen doesn't show the target or current coordinates correctly either and is missing an icon for the current location in the top left, but those are minor details)

On an unrelated note, I've been able to finally see a problem I keep hearing about in reviews but have yet to reliably reproduce, which is the compass screen not working properly. I am toying with the idea of a major facelift for the app as it's not obvious to me what might cause this. Well, that and among other things the code could really use a face-lift now that I'm a better iOS programmer. I have a few ideas, but if you have a wishlist for Geopher Lite (or iPhone/iPad geocaching in general), the next few weeks would be a good time to shoot me an email.

As always thanks for using Geopher Lite!

Ads

So, I'm thinking of making an ad supported version of Geopher Lite. I wonder if it would make any difference.

I've been thinking about this since I had that 24 hour (ish) sale and made the app free. I don't think that it actually did anything other than get about 800 people to try the app out. That was a huge spike in one day.

With an ad supported version I think that some people out there who might use Geopher Lite if there were no up-front cost.

Obviously I'll post here if/when it happens.

As for the iPad, I've not gotten much feedback, and what I have got is mostly that people wouldn't want to use it on the iPad anyhow. So I doubt I could even pay off an iPad with the 3G chip if I ported it anyhow. I still may do so, but it won't be at least until late summer.

As always, thanks for stopping by.

Opinion

I've not had a single email about iPad support as of yet, so I thought I would find out any interest here. Would you be interested in an update for Geopher Lite for the iPad 3G version? And if so, what would you like to see in that update?

If anyone missed it, the 3G version will have GPS, I suspect because GPS is part of the 3G chip that apple is using. the non-3G iPad will not have GPS available.

Feel free to drop me an email or comment here. Thanks!

Tablet

Things have been quiet around here lately. Did everyone fall asleep? Oh wait, sorry, that was me!

Apple is announcing a new device tomorrow, reportedly a tablet computer of some sort. If it has a GPS init, I will be updating Geopher Lite to be using said tablet. I'm itching to do a number of projects on such a device. Don't hold your breath, but if the tablet is as capable as I think it might be, I will likely update Geopher Lite to a full version of Geopher, with all that that would entail. If I do so I'll announce it here once development is under way.

I have to say, even though my plan of working with geocaching.com didn't go as planned, it's been a fun and interesting ride to watch paperless caching come into it's own as a real paperless option. Thanks to everyone who have helped make this happen, not only with Geopher Lite, but with the many options that are available!

Holiday sale

Hey all. For any of you who have been waiting for some oddball reason to get Geopher Lite, it is now on sale for FREE for the next 24 hours. Enjoy!

Haitus

Due to personal reasons development has slowed on Geopher Lite. Don't count me out yet, but don't expect much in the next while.

Just for fun, I've changed the price to $0.99 U.S. for the time being.

Thanks for stopping by.

What's next?

Well, it's been a couple of weeks and I've had little feedback on the new version. How is it treating everyone? Anybody notice anything odd or out of place? (Or even better, anything that works better than you'd hoped?)

I've been looking into caching the last viewed website, but it's an uphill battle. I actually had code months ago to do this, but I never got all the images and such to re-display properly. So I'm looking at that.

I'm also thinking about doing something with the download links on the geocaching.com webpage. It would be nice if you could press the download button for a LOC or GPX file and get the coordinates that way rather than typing them in.

That's about all that's happening on the Geopher Lite front at the moment. As always, suggestions, comments and complaints are welcome. Thanks for stopping by.

Released

Geopher 1.1 has been released in the app store as of this morning. Please let me know if there are any issues that need resolved. I'll probably be a bit slower on updating, but I have no plans to shelve this and close up shop either, so suggestions are welcome.

Thanks everyone for using Geopher Lite!

Still no word

...from apple on approval.

No news I suppose is good news.

A note to users who may be seeing the new screenshots on the iTunes store. These screenshots represent the new pending version. Apologies if this causes any confusion.

edit: Firday, Sep 11, still no word from apple. I'll post here when the update is available.

Doh!

So I got an email back from apple a little while ago.

Apparently it's not a good idea to have a blank google maps interface or a blank search box when a user has no internet connectivity. I've got to add an alert or something to notify the user or this "could lead to user confusion".

They sent me this screenshot back to make the point.


I guess I don't think you all are that ignorant, but I could be wrong. =)

I actually appreciate this about apple, though it is slightly annoying. I never particularly thought this was an issue, but I suppose that some might consider it confusing. I'm glad they are working to keep apps as quality as possible. It is, however, just another obstacle to get my changes to you guys, that's the real downside. Ah well, at least the rejection was fairly positive and suggested that I re-submit the app after this was taken care of.

I'll update with this in mind and resubmit this evening sometime.

Done

Geopher Lite 1.1 has been submitted to apple for approval.

Thanks for being patient with me everyone. Hopefully it was voluntary patience and not too forced. =)

Here are the update notes, broken down a bit for more detail than what you'll see in the store:
- Added in-app map support. This has a pretty straightforward interface, with a button to go to your current location as well as a button which shows the target location. The target location button will alternate between zooming out to show both points and centering the map on the target position. There's room here to have it zoom in as well, but I didn't get that far and that's minor. Maybe later.
- Added 3GS compass support. I actually fixed a couple rare case bugs with the compass system due to looking at this for so long. 3G compass support is unfortunately going to remain the same. Let me know if the filtering is too extreme. Usually it's been OK for me but indoors or under heavy cover it's pretty bad. I've got a 3GS now so this likely won't change unless one fo you guys gets involved. =)
- Added a few preferences. These include magnetic or true north (effects the 3GS compass only) and an option to continue to use google maps for mapping as opposed to the in-app mapping support.

- Bug with coordinate saving fixed. This was caused by the waypoint field being less than 5 characters.
- local preferences crash issue. This was caused by things happening sometimes out of order when the application quits. Also a potential cause of coordinates not being saved.
- Fixed a problem with URL linking not behaving quite correctly. I'm not sure if anyone is even using this right now, but it now works a bit cleaner. I probably won't touch this again unless there's good reason to do so since it's such a niche feature.
- Cleaned up the FAQ/Help quite a bit.

Future improvements that I have in mind, which are things I'd like to get around to, but are not pressing include:
- allowing for a download of a LOC/GPX from the geocaching.com webpage. I'm a html n00b so I'm not sure what to tweak to get the UIWebView to support capturing the download. It simply doesn't give any feedback last time I checked so I'd have to go spelunking in apple's private API to try and figure that out. Not something I'm terribly comfortable with. Well, I do have the option of writing my own web browser from scratch, but I'm not looking forward to that either.
- fixing the zoom on the target button (and possibly the current location button) to be more automatic. This means zooming in and out a bit better in some circumstances. Someday if I can ever think of a way to add GPX support short of writing my own email client, it would be nice to add saved geocaches in this space.
- web page archiving. I have preliminary support for this, but it looks kind of bad because it doesn't save the entire page, just the text. This would be a bit time consuming, but be great to have around for general purpose stuff.
- Better skins. I keep thinking I need to revisit my default purple arrow and maybe the default compass as well to help things look a bit nicer. I did this once and actually made a couple things look worse. Is hould get a real artist to help. I'd also like to do a bar style compass as well as a better outdoor black and white compass view.

I'll post again once we are approved. Thanks for using Geopher Lite!

News!

First off, my apologies for the dearth of news. I've been busy, distracted and out of sorts lately. But I'm back. And I didn't forget about you guys, despite the lack of updates.

A couple of weeks ago I made the decision to not release an update until I had the compass rotation working properly. It didn't feel right to release a 3.0 update without better compass support. My apologies for the delay, especially for those who are waiting for the coordinate saving bug fix. I know it's annoying and less than ideal.

I've been struggling with the compass rotation for an embarassing amount of time. I didn't have a 3GS until a few days ago, so I wasn't able to do a lot of actual testing. The little that I did get to do, the compass worked quite incorrectly. Sure the compass spun, but it didn't spin where I expected or where I wanted to go.

So I took today off of work and decided to make it my goal to get the compass working today. It's working. And the code has been updated in the SVN repository for those of you following along at home. Assuming anyone is.

For you aspiring developers out there, I want to let you in on a little CLLocation secret. When the description of a property says this:

"The value in this property represents the heading that points toward the magnetic North Pole, which is different than the geographic North Pole. The value in this property is always measured relative to the top of the device, regardless of the device’s physical or interface orientation. The value 0 represents magnetic North, 90 represents magnetic East, 180 represents magnetic South, and so on. The value in this property should always be valid."

This paragraph means that the heading 0 is NOT relative to the top of the screen, which I incorrectly understood, but that 0 is always relative to the direction that is NORTH. Or magnetic north in this example. Big difference. Hopefully you can see how I misunderstood this information with the example above. I'll have to send a note to apple about that.

So what does that mean to you guys? Well, long story short, I've spent a number of of evenings and a half a day today trying to figure out why my compass wasn't working. Well, unbeknownst to me, it WAS working... assuming that 0 was the top of the iPhone regardless of where it was pointing. Which is not the case. I simply had to do some correctional math and viola... working compass!

I feel kind of dumb now.

But here I am hoping that sharing my folly with the world does some good for someone. =)

So, that out of the way, I still have one problem to tackle relative to getting the release out. I thought I had the map view completely working but the titlebar is now showing up funny. Funny as in there are two that are overlapping improperly. I suspect this is due to the new SDK I am using with snow leopard, but it's difficult to say for sure.

On a side note, I've not seen a ton of snow leopard so far, but what I have seen I like! For $29 it's worth the upgrade price, if nothing else for the wake/sleep speedup times on my laptop. =)

Anyway. Once the above issue is taken care of I will add an auto-zoom the map view. When it's opened it will show both the target location as well as the current location. It shows only the current location right now, but I'd like it to zoom in/out far enough so that it shows the current location and the target location both on the same map screen appropriately. I think I know how to do this; it will just take a little math and playing around with the API to make sure I'm thinking about this correctly. I almost left this for another update but couldn't. Like the compass it just wouldn't feel right unless I get this working okay for the update.

Oh, and I've added a preference to choose to see magnetic north or true north, with the default set to true north.

Once I submit the update I'll post again and reiterate the feature list for the new version.

Suggestions, comments and criticism are always welcome. Thanks for dropping by!