I Like What You've Done With The Place

You may have heard that a new version of the Geocaching iPhone/iPodTouch application was released this week, and it included many nice enhancements, including:

• New Advanced Search to filter by location, cache type, difficulty/terrain, keyword, exclude your finds, exclude finds for up to 4 friends, and Premium caches;
• Sync Personal Cache Notes between the website and your iPhone;
• Create multiple offline cache lists to plan outings; useful when you may be travelling outside network coverage;
• Download Pocket Queries to the iPhone to view cache details, images, and map tiles offline;
• Numerous bug fixes to address performance and reliability.

The new, advanced search feature is particularly nice. Here are some screen shots:

Filter your search by cache type if you like. Include or exclude your previous finds.

Filter by difficulty and/or terrain rating and cache size.

You can also exclude cache finds by other cachers - great for cache outings with your friends.

After you've selected all of your desired filters, hit the search button, and you'll be presented with a list of all the caches that meet your criteria near your current location. You can then save that listing to your device for later use. You can also click on the icon in the upper-right corner to see a map of your selected caches:

You can also download pocket queries to your device just as before, but now you have the option of including map tiles with your pocket query:

However, unless you have a lot of memory on your iPhone/iPodTouch, I'd advise against using this option. I downloaded a pocket query with 1,000 caches to my 8GB iPodTouch and chose to include the Topo Map tiles, which ultimately crashed my unit. This feature worked fine, though, with a much smaller pocket query.

All in all, these are great enhancements. And the ability to save searches to your device for later, off-line use is especially appreciated by us iPodTouch users.

Cache On!