Tag: Geocaching

Posted on

On Robots, Automation, APIs Opencaching and Groundspeak

I Am Not The Droid U R Looking 4

Groundspeak is shooting itself in the foot, and with the new opencaching.com website, sponsored by Garmin, it’s time they stop being selfish and open up their API … and they better do it quickly.

dor.ky blog, by Scott Wilcox, has a great explanation and a few good comments on why groundspeak needs to open their API.

The forums at groundspeak on the topic pretty much ended with a comment from Jeremy (doubtlessly employed at Groundspeak) stating:

There is a private API and it is available for trusted partners. We have no plans to offer an open public API at this time. It was considered in the past but the current decison is to keep it private.

Sounds short-sighted, if you ask me – especially considering that this comment was made August 2008, nearly two and a half years ago and they still haven’t opened their API.

Why does this interest me? Support tools by fans would be an enormous benefit to Groudspeak. I would like to develop an app or even a web-page that helped geocachers manage and automate their virtual caches. Imagine, as a geocache owner, that you are able to provide a form for people to simply fill out. Once done, it allows the geocacher to log that they found the virtual. (Better yet, it even automates their log post if they have the right answers!)

Imagine, then, the service growing from that idea, allowing earth caches and history caches along with the virtual caches … all automated.

Currently, Groundspeak not only doesn’t provide an API, but their site license prohibits the use of spiders, robots, scraping, etc. That’s understandable, but they should create an API. Google’s done it and see how they’ve grown. Flickr’s done it, too… they’re going strong despite the competition. It appears that any strong data-driven company has an open API. People want to automate process, they want to enhance the experience.

As @williamtm commented on the dor.ky blogpost Why GeoCaching.com needs an API

If an API was made available, and a company/developer like atebits, TapBots, or any number of the excellent developers out there decided to make a Geocaching app, doubtless it would be brilliant. For starters, you can dump the ugly custom UI, improve the speed of it, and, as you said, improve the reputability of it over 3G/EDGE/etc, and bam, you might have an app that’s actually worth £5.99.

Fact is, the app as it is now is just terrible. It rarely seems to work when I’m out and about and want to find nearby caches, and often simply visiting the website using Safari and finding caches that way is faster.

At such a critical time when new geocachers are nudged into other offerings, it’s the combination of a variety of good tools and access to data that will win the race. Opencaching.com already has a public API out and ready for anyone who wants to develop a kick-a$$ iPhone app for them (and I would be one of the first ones to buy it)… Is geocaching.com up to the challenge?

Posted on

Two Twists on Locationless Geocaches

Reverse Geocache with Nixie Tubes featured at www.arduino.cc

The big game buzz along the techy interwebs is “Reverse Geocaching”.

Geocaching.com identifies these as locationless geocaches and no longer tracks them as such, though they are tracked as waymarks on the other groundspeak service.

From their website (at the bottom of the page):

Locationless (Reverse) Cache
Locationless caches could be considered the opposite of a traditional cache. Instead of finding a hidden container, you are given a task to locate a specific object and log its coordinates. A scavenger hunt of sorts, it involves collecting waypoints of various objects around the world.

Locationless caches have evolved into Waymarking. Waymark categories are similar to how locationless caches were listed on geocaching.com, but you can now search for the locations in each category.

At least one person got around this problem by turning the box into a travelbug. I’m not sure if it’s the same guy who recently released his reverse geocache box with fancy nixie tubes or not… but on the arduino forums, the latest popular reverse geocache creator had this to say:

A work buddy of mine who is really into geocaching is turning 30 in two weeks. He’ll get the box with his present inside.

The plan is, that he’ll pass it on to another friend once he opened and reprogrammed it.

Every owner can log his experiences with the box on geocaching.com by using a geocode that is spray painted on the box (If you ever did geocaching: It’s treated like a travebug – The groundspreak rules aren’t allowing moving caches).

The url for tracking the box is: http://www.coord.info/TB3W7NC.

Notice that the geocode starts with “TB” instead of “GC”. That means it is a travel bug, folks! As mentioned in the groundspeak forums, you can’t put a travel bug within a travel bug. But it could be mentioned in the description that travel bugs within this “Cache” are not currently supported.

Now to the second twist on locationless geocaches. It’s more like a mashup of locationless geocaches and puzzle caches. Geocache GC2D4NK, owned by Spatial Distortion, takes you to a website where you enter coordinates as if you were virtually there with a reverse geocache box. The returned value is the (unintentionally, incorrectly calculated) number of meters between the coordinates entered and the destination. Assuming you were provided the correct distance, you could triangulate the box coordinates by picking three locations across the U.S. map. This is a clever idea, allowing nerds like me the satisfaction of locating the “locationless” geocache from at home. (Though I don’t plan on taking any trips near that location anytime in my lifetime, but who knows?)

Oh – one more thing. I’ve heard that Geocaching.com will be resuming the virtual geocaches in the very near future (check back within 30 days). I know the founders are trying to move geocaching into social networking. I can’t help but think there’s a connection. I also wonder if they’ve devised a way to automate the question/answer process, making virtual caches easier to manage.

Posted on

Geocaching App Hack?

The other day I launched my Geocaching. I have problems with it left and right. For example, if you leave the app, the coordinates on the “Search” page won’t update. You don’t get a purple arrow in the iPhone header, either. However, if you navigate to a cache then exit out of it back into the main “Search” page, it works again.

I’ve also heard about Pocket Queries, but have never tried it (I’m not a subscribed Geocaching.com member – at least not yet). When you go to your “Saved” page, the “Pocket Queries” section displays with a greyed-out button aptly named “Download Pocket Queries”. Then you have tons of green space beneath it that should be used to encourage the user to become a member to activate the pocket queries functionality. If pocket queries is not a paid membership thing, then someone please let me know and I’ll give you credit for the follow-up post that enlightens the world on the matter.

But this post isn’t about technical GPS bugs or pocket queries, but about an interesting thing that happened to me the other day while opening the Geocaching app right after it crashed.

I’m not sure what caused this, but as soon as I had the chance, I took a snapshot. I couldn’t scroll down because the Geocaching app had crashed again almost immediately (I was lucky to get the snapshot).

Notice some peculiarities? The first thing I saw was the grey pill that sits beneath the coordinates. It shows the text “$PREMIUM”, “$FOUND”, “$INACTIVE”. If only they could show this text all the time (sans the dollar sign). Now I know what that pill means. I’ve seen the green “Found” light up on geocaches when I erase then reload the search results, but didn’t know what the other two-thirds of the pill meant. As a developer, I know the “$” usually denotes a variable or stand-in text. I just wish the designers of the app went far enough to clean up the interface and make the items easier to recognize (like keeping the labels on the pill even when it’s grey) and updating it for the higher resolution (the graphic compass is horrid)!

There are some other interesting items to note. First is the mention of “BDude”, and the second is the Geocache ID “GC5837).

BDude’s profile shows that the last time he logged in was the 26th April, 2008 (Exactly 1 year from when he signed up as a member … to the day) to log finding the Geocache ID GC1BEF3, named “Heron Hangout” by ehoguy, Eva & NVtro. This cache is in Massachusetts.

Geocache GC5837 Details an archived virtual cache near the India gate in New Delhi, India.

I’ll let you speculate at why BDude is tied to a virtual cache in Delhi without any mention of it in his profile. Comments, please.