Bookmark sync feature

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Hello iCachers,

It’s been a long time since the last post here. This summer I quietly released iCaching 10.0 with a very great new feature: automatic sync of bookmark folders.

When you have bookmark lists on the Geocaching.com website, they will now automatically appear in the left pane of iCaching. Changes you make to the list in iCaching will sync back to Geocaching.com and vice versa. These Bookmark folders work like the normal Folders in iCaching, so you can drag and drop caches in them, remove caches from them etc. But then it syncs.

This makes iCaching the perfect companion for the mobile geocaching apps; first you start exploring a nice collection of geocaches on your big Mac screen, and put them in a Bookmark folder.

Then you go out in the field with the mobile app and search geocaches from the synced Bookmark folder in the app. For the geocaches you find, you create a quick ‘draft’ log in the app.

And once your back home, enjoying a nice coffee or beer, you go to the Log window in iCaching and you get the draft logs from Geocaching.com and you make nice complete logs from them, describing your adventures finding those caches.

I really hope you enjoy this feature, and please let me know what you think of it.

Happy (i)Caching!

Happy birthday; iCaching 10 years!

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Unbelievable, but it is already 10 years ago that iCaching was released in the (then brand new) Mac App Store.

As geocacher and Mac user I was at that time searching for a tool to help me prepare geocache trips. But there were only a few very limited tools available. When I prepared a trip with a friend I was a bit jealous on his Windows tool called GSAK. In the same period I was trying to figure out developing software for the Mac as a hobby, while I created some small tools on Windows before I switched to Mac. So that became the start of iCaching.

Few months after I had the first very limited version of iCaching, Apple introduced the Mac App Store. Then it became my goal to make my little tool available for other Mac geocachers. Around three months after the inception of the App Store, I had a version that was good enough to release to the public.
For reference, the most actual macOS version at that time was 10.6 Snow Leopard.

iCaching 1.0

In all those years, many many hours of development went into the app, which is now a really mature versatile geocaching tool. My goal is still what it was back then: make a tool that is easy to use in a way that Mac users expect. So respect the user interface guidelines and sometimes don’t add features if it will make the user interface cluttered and unclear.

I wish everybody a lot of fun with iCaching in a lot more years to come.

Marius de Reus

Ps. If you want to recommend iCaching to a geocaching mate, then now is the time to do so. For this special occasion I do a one time promotion with 30% off the usual price from March 15 to April 14 2021.

Personal note and coordinate sync

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Hi dear iCaching people,

Last week a new version of iCaching rolled out. The tentpole feature of this version is the new sync for personal notes and corrected coordinates.
This was a much requested feature.

At first I was hesitant to build it, because of the fact that it will overwrite the values that you might have entered on Geocaching.com. Therefore, when you change a personal note (the yellow area on the Info tab) or you change a corrected coordinate, iCaching will ask you if you want to send it to geocaching.com.
You can check the ‘never ask again’ button to remember your choice depending on your preferred workflow. You can always change this choice in the Preference window.

When syncing personal notes, iCaching needs to do a separate network call to the Geocaching API for every single note. And this is only allowed once every two seconds. So when editing several notes simultaneously , this could have resulted in a very slow operation. This meant that I had to remove the ability to edit the personal note for several selected geocaches in one go.

If your workflow depends on downloading GPX files from Geocaching (instead of calling the API functions to download geocaches), then be careful; if you send the corrected coordinates to Geocaching.com, they will replace the coordinate in GPX files with the corrected one without any indication that this is a corrected coordinate. So when you import those into iCaching, the original coordinate will become the same as your corrected one, which might be very confusing. In the API responses there are luckily separate fields for original and corrected coordinates. So no problem there.

Groundspeak only allows this feature for premium users.

I really hope you enjoy this new version!

Happy (i)Caching in 2021

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Happy new year folks. Wish you a good and healthy year with a lot of finds!