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!