Battery Pack

I was talking with a friend recently and was reminded of this battery charger idea that I thought I would share with you all. It's got a better than average charge capability, runs on 2 AA batteries (regular or rechargeable), and fits neatly in your pocket. Nothing like some minty fresh GPSing with your iPhone!

This will take some technical know-how, but if you've never done something like this before, chances are you know someone who can help you if you'd like to give it a go.





I first learned about this neat device here. The kit as linked above is roughly $20. Enjoy!

Update submitted

Hey all.

I submitted a minor update of Geopher Lite this evening, which includes the following changes:

- Changed compass images to contain rotated text.
- Fixed a couple of potential crash bugs
- added code to allow reverse-URL linking (jumping back to another app via a URL) to use Geopher Lite as a compass only.
- changed the coordinate saving code to reduce the chance of coordinates not saving properly in rare cases.

Thanks for stopping by.

Geopher Lite opens up

Hey all.

This project is killing me. There are so many things I'd like to do here and so little time I have to do them. So I've decided to take a big leap and open up the source code to Geopher Lite.

Yeah, you heard right. If you are so inclined, you can jump in and make some changes to the sourcecode.

That said, I am going to continue to work on Geopher Lite in my spare time and continue to update it. As soon as a nail down a bug with URL linking I will be making another official release on the app store. I will probably change the price to the lowest price point if not make it free entirely. I'm not giving up or shelving this project, but this will give people a chance to jump in and get their hands dirty if so inclined.

In other news, I've had a user request Geopher Lite to interact with geocaching.hu, which is apparently a geocaching site that is much more popular in that area than geocaching.com. I've sent them an email, we will see what happens there.

The source code can be found here, via anonymous SVN checkout:

http://geopherlite.beanstalkapp.com/geopherlite

edit: use this link if you'd prefer not to sign up with beanstalk: http://geopherlite.svn.beanstalkapp.com/geopherlite
I hadn't realized that you needed to log in to get to the other page. I had a few people point that out to me, thanks!

Oh and I am relatively new to objective-C, cocoa, and the iPhone platform. Beware. =)

I want to give a special thanks to Branden Russell, Wim Verhoef and all the previous beta testers who have helped with some of the background work of Geopher Lite. Thanks guys!

Thanks to everyone else for your continued feedback and support. You know who you are.

Happy new year!

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!

Good and bad

So, I have some good news and bad news.

The good news is that apple has recently released some sample code that allows saving web pages for offline viewing. This is exactly what I've been trying to get working with cURL but have had mixed progress with. To bring you up to date, I've gotten cURL working with mixed results. The web page saves, but the images and such do not easily, so I was having to write all of that manually. This should help a lot with that. So if all goes well the next release of Geopher Lite will have web archiving capability. For those of you who are developers and curious, you can check out some of my initial work with cURL here. It's not everything I've done, but the initial part of getting it working.

That said... Yesterday my 3 year old "cleaned off" my iPhone in the toilet. It was still on when I grabbed it from her, I think she just dipped it in and was wiping it off when I got to it. Still. I turned it off (the touch screen wasn't working and flickering on and off) and quickly stuck it in a bowl of dry rice to try and wick away the water as much as possible. I'll let you all know tomorrow morning when I dare try turning it on again if it actually works still or not. So that may be a setback to getting this next version released, I'm going to try and not have it be though. I may have to rely more heavily on my beta testers for this one.

Always something. =)

S-L-O-W

Hey everyone.

I have to be honest, my drive behind Geopher has had a gunshot wound to the head and it's slow going what with everything else that's happening in my life. However, I still want a better solution than what is out there for the iPhone, so I am not giving up, it is just taking a bit longer than I had planned.

I'd like to get an update to you all by thanksgiving (That's towards the end of november for you non-U.S. folks) on Geopher Lite in between other things and I'll see what I can do there. This would include the rotated compass graphics (which have been done actually since the end of september, shame on me for not getting those to you sooner), probably the GCxxxx on the main target screen and the new outdoor skin. There are other potentialities for that release, but I won't promise anything else.

Hang in there and thanks for stopping by!

Quickie

Hey, just a note to let you all know that I'm still here, I've not forgotten about you.

Lots of stuff happening for me lately, so I've not done much of anything for the iPhone in about a week.

I left work tonight at 10:15 PM. This isn't unusual lately, I think I need to talk with my boss.

Good news on the web archive front, I've made some progress there. Someone has also suggested allowing field notes in the final version, I have thought about this and wanted to get some feedback on it. For the moment I'm thinking of allowing you to add notes and then giving you the option to email yourself the notes with a link to the cache that they are attached to so you can log them or do whatever you need. It'd be great for logging bugs and coins and the like.

Groundspeak's app finally hit the app store this weekend. It's worth checking out, but I'm a bit disappointed in the initial offering -- I was hoping for a bit more than that. Still, there's tons of potential with it.

I'm planning on posting my thoughts about the current geocaching software that's out there and what a user's options are. At the moment things are very usable, and there are a number of choices. Some decent options at the moment, though nothing anyone is dying over. I think that groundspeak has the best shot at that, but there's plenty of room for competition.

Thanks for stopping by, as always drop me a line with feedback or questions, I'm happy to help where I can.