15th Anniversary

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This post is a little overdue, but last March iCaching turned 15. I can hardly believe it 😉

I originally started building iCaching to fulfil my own wish for a native Mac app to manage my geocaches. Over the years it has grown into a versatile, complete geocaching app for macOS that a few thousand other Mac geocachers now enjoy.

In the early years it was mainly used to sort out a list of geocaches for a trip and transport them to a handheld GPS. Nowadays it’s more about sync functionality with the Geocaching mobile app: sort out which caches you want to find, sync a bookmark list with the app, log your finds with a concept log in the mobile app (or still with a handheld GPS), and sync them back to iCaching to write nice logs on your Mac.

It is and will be my mission to make iCaching fit like a glove into macOS and make it powerful and easy to use. This year the work on iCaching is mainly under-the-hood modernisation and improvements, replacing some old foundations with new techniques. This is possible because I raised the minimum required macOS version, and recently switched to a subscription model to enable future investment in the development of iCaching.

Thank you for your support, and happy (i)Caching!

Version 1 (or 2) of iCaching in a time where toolbars still had coloured icons 😉

iCaching goes subscription [Update: is released]

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Update July 2026: This week I released the first subscription based version of iCaching (12.0.0). Thanks all for your help, no need to send logs for this purpose anymore.



It took a long time to make this decision, but I have to move to subscriptions. The current pay-upfront model does not generate sustainable income to make time to work on iCaching. Not that it needs to be profitable, but I need to be able to skip enough regular-job-time to work on it.

But I don’t want my loyal old customers to have to subscribe when they already bought an upfront license. So the last version (11.1.1) already contains a detection mechanism for current upfront licensees.

Can I ask you, current iCaching user, for help? I would like to receive your logs to verify that this detection logic works flawlessly. You can send me your logs (which by the way will NOT contain personal information) in a few simple steps:

  • Go to the Help menu in iCaching (top of screen)
  • Choose ‘Email Support…’
  • A new mail is composed with the logs already attached
  • Write something nice (optional) 😉
  • Send the mail

This will help me to make sure that current customers don’t have to subscribe to continue to use iCaching.

iCaching icon - Liquid GlassteamGiants 2026

Happy holidays

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It’s that time of the year again; the holidays. So let me wish you all great days, especially for the ones that are lonely. I hope you all feel the warmth of the good news that we celebrate with Christmas.

This is also the time of the year where I have some extra days to work on iCaching. And apparently I value coding above keeping the website up to date. I noticed most of it wasn’t updated since 2014. So the screenshots looked quite a bit out of date and newer features were not mentioned at all.

So I did something about that, and now most of it is shiny and fresh again. The screenshots are from the not-yet-released version 11, so they give you a nice sneak peak at the new design. Enjoy.

Tahoe release almost there

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It took a bit longer than I wanted, but version 11 with a complete Tahoe overhaul is almost ready.

In this release the whole interface of iCaching got a facelift, and now fits perfectly within Apples latest macOS release.

Also under the hood, a lot of code is optimised, which is the main reason that this version will only be available for macOS Big Sur (11) and higher.

A lot of releases

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You might have noticed quite a few iCaching updates recently.

In early January, I started getting reports from users about duplicate logs appearing in iCaching after updating to macOS 15.2. It turned out that Apple had introduced a bug in Core Data, the underlying data management framework iCaching relies on. I attempted to work around this issue in the first fix release, but unfortunately, that introduced other problems.

Later, I discovered that the Apple bug also affected other parts of the app, like exporting logs to GPX files, leading to yet another update.

On top of that, two users reported that fetching found geocaches at startup had stopped working. After a deep dive, I uncovered a long-standing bug in iCaching that had been there since this feature was introduced. The function retrieves your finds since the last known log date, but under certain conditions around the end of the year, it failed. (For the nerds: I don’t use Java, but this article explains the issue I ran into.) The fix for this was released in version 10.8.0.
That update also introduced a new way to reach me in case of issues; now, you can send a support email directly from the Help menu, which automatically includes version details and application logs.

And just when I thought everything was sorted, a small mistake in one of my last fixes for the Apple bug caused crashes when importing geocaches with logs. So, version 10.8.1 has just been sent to the App Store with a fix for that. Hopefully, this will be the last bug fix release for a long time!

Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience.

Happy (i)Caching

iCaching in the PodCacher podcast

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Recently I had a very nice interview with Sonny from PodCacher. In the show we talked about the beginning of iCaching, about its features and even a bit about the future. You can listen to this show at: https://www.podcacher.com/show-846-0-geocaching-tool-icaching/

Enjoy!

Black Friday and price change

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Not so often in the history of iCaching I have done promotions. Actually only once on the 10th anniversary. But this time I make an exception; with all the higher cost for living and energy, I give a 35% discount on iCaching for a week, starting now!

And even bigger news: I also never changed the price tier of iCaching. The only price fluctuations throughout the years have come from Apple changing the prices because of exchange rates. However with the current expensive dollar (for us Europeans), I think it is time to choose a lower price tier. So after the Black Friday promotion I will also lower the normal price around 20%.

Note: the price of iCaching is a perpetual license, not a subscription. So pay once, enjoy forever.

Tell your friends, enjoy iCaching!

New: Czech localisation

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The biggest new thing in the latest iCaching version is the addition of Czech localisation. Geocaching is pretty big in the Czech Republic and I got several request for this locale. So now finally its there 😉

iCaching now supports 5 languages: English, Dutch, French, German and Czech.

Hereby a big thank you for my translators; Richard, Ange and Joerg!

Raising minimum macOS version

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It’s never nice to abandon an old macOS version. But from time to time, I have to do that. This is the only way to be able to use Apples latest APIs and techniques.

The version that I will drop from iCaching 10.4 is macOS 10.12 (Sierra). The good news is that all Macs that can run macOS 10.12 can also run macOS 10.13 (High Sierra). So if you want to have the latest iCaching, you can update your OS and you’re good. Moreover: everyone should always try to keep up with the latest possible macOS update for their machine to get the latest features, fixes and more importantly: the latest security updates.

So this time it should not hurt anyone 😉

Export to GGZ and macOS Monterey 12.3

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Recently Apple released the latest update of macOS Monterey version 12.3. Since that version Apple removed the build in Python support. Unfortunately exporting geocaches to GGZ relies on a Python script that converts the GPX files to a GGZ file. This means that export to GGZ is not working anymore from this macOS update.

I looked for a short time solution (manually installing Python), but that did not work out. So I am now rewriting the export and replicate the steps that happened within the Python script in native (Swift) application code.

As you can imagine, that is not a few hours task, but quite big. So while I work on that, please don’t update to this latest macOS version if you rely on GGZ files in your workflow. I will update this article when the fixed update of iCaching goes out.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: The version (10.2.1) with a fixed GGZ implementation is live