Posts

Tips and tricks: open geocache web page

Just a little tip for the weekend: You can open a geocache webpage directly by clicking the cache icon on the Info tab.

Tips and tricks: The Map window

The Map window has some nice (hidden) features. So it is worth a separate post.

What to show

By default the map shows the caches in the active folder. So the caches on the map are the same as the caches listed in the cache list of the main window. When you click on a cache symbol, the cache becomes the selected cache in the main window.

Only the additional waypoints of the selected cache are shown in the map. When you zoom out too far, the additional waypoints are hidden.

When you click on the little triangle button in the bottom right corner, a little panel pops up with some extra options. Here you can select which caches you want to see (all caches in the current Folder, or only the selected ones) and which additional waypoints you want to see.

Maptypes

iCaching has more maptypes to show than listed in the window. There are (standard Google Maps) buttons for roadmap (r), satellite (s), terrain (t) and hybrid (u). In some areas there are also 45 degrees aerial pictures available. You can also toggle between these views by the keyboard shortcuts as listed between brackets. But there are two more maptypes: OpenStreetMap and OpenCycleMap. You can show these by using the o and p keys.

Speed tip

For the time being (but hopefully not for too long), the Map is based on Google Maps. This has as disadvantage that it’s speed is not fantastic when you have a lot of caches. So when you have a big number of caches within iCaching, don’t open the Map when you are in the ‘All Caches’ folder, but from folders with about 3.000 caches max.

Tips and tricks: using filters

iCaching has a pretty powerfull filtering mechanism. You can do a single filter action by pressing the magnifier icon in the toolbar, but you can also save a filter as a so called ‘Smart Folder’.

The filter dialog uses a standard Apple interface element to create the filters, but apparently not all users are familiair with this. One of the most frequent questions for support is how to create a ‘negative’ filter. E.g. search for all caches not owned by me.  Therefore this little post to give some insight.

You can create a search based on one or multiple filters. For most properties of the geocaches there is a filter. Clicking on a ‘+’-button adds a new filter.

The real fun part begins when you add so called ‘compound filters’. There are three compound filters:

  • ‘none’, you can use this for a negative filter: all rules nested must be not true
  • ‘all’: all of the nested filters must be true
  • ‘some’: it’s enough when just one of the nested filters is true

You can add a compound filter by clicking on a ‘+’-button while holding the alt (or option) key. You can drag filters around to organize the ordering of the filters.

Tips for faster filters:

  • Start with the most discriminating filters, this way the filter function has less comparisons left for the second filter etc..
  • Also important for speed is the processing cost of a filter; a boolean comparision (eg. Available=Yes) is cheaper than a nummeric comparision, which is cheaper than a text-comparision.
  • Within text comparisions (e.g. woner, cachename etc) a ‘begins with’ filter on a textbase property is cheaper than the ‘contains’ filter, because the filter only has to look at the first characters instead of the whole text
  • And last but not least: filtering on cacheproperties is (much) faster than filtering on it’s collections: additional waypoints, logs and attributes.

Here is a screendump of the Smart Folder I use myself to fill my GPS:

SmartFolder