June 27, 2010

Get Off My Lawn

Don't get me wrong, I'm generally a pretty laid back, easy-going guy. But as I get older, I'm finding that the grumpy old man stereotype and I have a lot more in common. My latest gripe: the amount of time it takes to locate a geocache on Groundspeak's Geocaching iPhone Application.


Sure, I understand that one of the primary features of the app. is the ability to use a combination of GPS, Wi-Fi positioning and cell towers to determine your approximate location, and then tell you which geocaches you are closest to at any given moment. But what about us poor saps who can't afford the ridiculous $80 - $100 per month iPhone service charges, who  opted instead for the next best thing: an iPodTouch? Until that futuristic day when there is world-wide wi-fi coverage everywhere, we iPodTouchies are relegated to having to upload our pocket queries onto our touches before heading out on a caching trip. 


Don't get me wrong; I love this feature, and in fact, it has allowed me to use my iPodTouch as my primary paperless caching tool. But what gets my goat is how friggin' long it takes to scroll through the list of caches to find the cache listing of the geocache I am either looking for, or trying to log. And now that Groundspeak allows you to store 1,000 caches instead of 500, it takes even longer to find any given cache on my device. 


I generally sort my pocket query list by "name", and then shudder anytime I pull up to a cache that starts with a letter near the end of the alphabet. Often times I spend more time looking for the cache listing on my device than I do looking for the actual, physical cache. Couldn't Groundspeak simply add a search tool to the pocket query list menu? Just sayin'. 


And another thing...


Cache On!

2 comments:

geoff said...

I haven't tried this yet and I use an iPhone so please accept the information with a grain of salt. I would download the PQ to GSAK, the filter on CentrePoint. I often use the first cache in an area or a known position. Then I export to make a GPX file that I can upload to GC.com and pick up as a PQ on the iPhone. Sounds convaluted, but might work. Good luck, love the blog.

GeoJoe said...

Hi Geoff,

Thanks for the suggestion. It just might work, although the application seems to want to sort your PQ list 1 of 3 ways (by Distance (which doesn't help me without a wifi connection), Title, or GC#). If it maintains the sort order from GC.com when I bring it in, then I'm set as long as I don't change it. I'll give it a try and see what happens. Thanks!