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

Just re-uploaded version 4.4

After a three week struggle with a technical issue concerning App Store approval, I just resubmitted version 4.4 for review. So when the guys of the review team don’t have another surprise, this update can be available soon.

This release is mainly a bugfix release. We managed to solve a bug in the importroutines for fetching pocketqueries through the API.

As a little surprise, we added OpenStreetMap and OpenCycleMap support to the Map window. For this version there is no visible user interface yet to use these maptypes, but by pressing ‘o’ (for OSM) or ‘p’ (for SCM) you can use these.

By the way, did you know that you can already use the keyboard shortcuts ‘r’ (roadmap), ‘s’ (satellite), ‘t’ (terrain), ‘u’ (satellite + roads) in the current version for switching maptypes?