korey99

Peoria Area Cachers We're an active group of geocachers from central Illinois, based in Peoria. We hold many events, including monthly meet and greets, an annual float trip, and our signature event, the Peoria Area Cache Bash. Take a look at our upcoming events listed on our website: http://www.peoriaareacachers.com!

They are a private company, in business to make money. We don't know their profits and budgets, and it's not our place to speculate. I don't agree with all the decisions the company makes, but until someone posts a picture of the CEO getting out of his Ferrari, I'm not going to make or support any claims that they're getting rich off my subscription. I do however reserve the right to the expect my money's worth.

I fixed it for you. If anything it should help you to understand and appreciate that ultimately APIs are neither "open" nor "free." Jeremy, there are over 500 posts in this thread, many of which are expressing dissatisfaction about the recent changes, and how your company handled the change management. You finally decide to weigh in, and instead of expressing some customer focus, you get pedantic with us?

With all due respect to the Groundspeak team, I don't think what was rolled out was ready for production, even just the things under their direct control. There are a lot of things broken, just silly little things even, that in my opinion should have been caught in testing. One poster mentioned printing maps. That should have been on a "regression test" script (in other words, here's what used to work, let's see if it still does). The little pet peeve that drives me nuts in the fact that on the cache page, the link to view the new maps is still labeled "Geocaching.com Google Map." Wouldn't a beta tester have spotted that? Throughout the rest of this thread are lots of other examples. I know there are lots of reason why quality can suffer (low budgets, staffing issues, etc.) but as a paying customer, and a cache hider (contributor), I really don't feel that I need to be "grateful" for keeping the service running. Google's intention to start charging for their maps API was publicly announced in early November of last year. Since you're asking for viable alternatives, my suggestion is to have gotten the tile-caching server spun up in time for this rollout. Alternately, butter us up with some other killer feature we've been wanting, to take the sting off a bit.

You're wrong on this. It is a Groundspeak issue. Groundspeak created a product with Google maps and then sold it to their customers. Google is/was a supplier to Groundspeak. If I have some issue with the air conditioner in my car I fault the car manufacturer and not the supplier of the air conditioner. Thank you for this point. Google has always had the right to stop giving away their maps for free. I'm sure they paid plenty to acquire them.

Well, expecting Groundspeak to reinstate the old google maps is beating a dead horse, but identifying specific problems with the new setup I'd say is fair game. They can't control google, but there are still plenty of things they can do, like implement more tile caching, remember map preferences, making the cache icons clickable on mobile devices, etc. The number of people weighing in is also valuable to know, as it could be used to gauge what needs fixed worst.

I know no one here can do anything about it, but I've always wondered why Google doesn't provide a free map API option that includes ads on the tiles. The tiles they provide are really nice, but I could get along with them fine if they called out every Starbucks on the map, or in the non-populated areas had a subtle "Need affordable auto insurance?" link on the tiles, kinda like they do on some youtube videos. Of course, the assumption is they don't already embed subliminal messages on them anyway Sorry for being somewhat off topic. I just have never really understood their business model of providing the maps to other websites through APIs without any ads on them. I'm sure I'm not the first person to think this up though...

That's a good point that I'd noticed but not mentioned before. Here's an example of the Illinois River not looking so good. The first is Mapquest: Here's Google's satellite view, showing how things really are: OSM is better than Mapquest, but it's not default: And just for completeness, Mapquest Aerial never did really load:

Now that you mention it, one of my projects didn't require an API key either, I don't think... It must use the referrer or something like that to figure out who's asking for maps. My project is at Cache Radius Map Modifying that would be a simple matter. Like your project, it just reads data from a GPX and displays it in a Google Map. It's kind of pain having to deal with the GPX files rather than live data though. Like I said before, Groundspeak allowing us to access their web service/API would be nice. A year and a half ago or so I was playing around with developing a "personal" geocaching site using Drupal. I wrote some code to ingest the results of a pocket query into the Drupal data model then used an openlayers module to display my pocket queries on a map (as well as a few other visualizations). I deployed it on a server for which I had already obtained a GM API key and could display caches from my PQs in a variety of ways with a Google Maps base layer. I had a look at the javascript code for the greasemonkey script someone posted in this thread that will display caches on the base layer and there's nothing in there specifying an API key. A lackey indicated that they couldn't do something like it as it would violate their license agreement with Google. It's not clear to me if someone using this greasemonkey script would make it appear to Google that Groundspeak is violating their agreement. I have no idea what that agreement entails, or whether it's negotiable to allow Groundspeak users to provide personal GM API keys.

Don't take Geebus's name in vain with me. I'm not talking about a non-premium member, nor am I worried about getting more features than a non-premium member. I paid my premium subscription, and I'm comparing my total perceived value of the product I received last week to the value of the product I received this week. This week's is worse. The maps aren't as good. That is all. NO THEY ARE NOT. Geebus. Last week, a Premium and a "normal" member saw exactly the same maps. The Premium member had the extra option to hide/show caches based on their type. Now, a Premium and a "normal" member see exactly the same maps. The Premium member has the extra option to hide/show caches based on their type.

A while back I copied a GPS Visualizer map from their website to mine, and one of their stipulations is that you procure your own Maps API key and use it instead. All you had to do was place it in the javascript. It worked great. I too have been trying to think of a way to do something similar for the cache map. So far the only thing I've come up with is to browse the Google Map using your own site/drive with your own key, but you'd need to be able to call an API on geocaching.com to get the caches to display. I don't see that happening, but that's under Groundspeak's, not Google's, control.

Groundspeak- First, I definitely understand why the Google Maps had to go. We (and you) have benefited pretty well from those free maps all these years. I understand that that approach is not sustainable with the new pricing model. Now that that's gone away, however, I for one am going to have some higher expectations over what you CAN control. This was a huge takeaway, and my subscription dollars are getting me less than they did last week. Honestly I expect you to make it up to me. Give us a nice new feature, something that we've begged for, not a pet project (like the largely ignored Challenges).

Ok, good point. Presumably the unit won't re-read an untouched file so my previous tests were omitting a factor. I did about a dozen tests, and didn't come up with much conclusive. One thing I did figure out though, is that if you remove (or rename) all GPX files, boot the GPS (so the caches all clear out), plug back in and put the files you want on there, it will behave predictably. The file with the lowest filename seems to be used for any conflicts.

Oddly enough, I had two files at first, one named 345635_something.gpx and the other was geocaches.gpx. The first time I viewed the cache on my Oregon, it came from the former file. Then, I renamed geocaches.gpx to 11111_something.gpx, and when I viewed it on my Oregon, it referenced the 11111 file. Then, I named the 11111 file to 99999 (trying to determine whether filename sorting mattered), as well as several other renames of both files, but the description never changed any longer for any trials. So, if it's from the FAT order, I wouldn't have expected that... Any pattern I noticed seemed to be nothing more than superstition.

Well, the main use case is as follows: I build the database of caches I want to load in GSAK, then send those caches to my Oregon (which creates geocaches.gpx). A few days later, the guys at work want to go after a couple of new caches over lunch. My data from GSAK is stale, but I can grab my latest pocket query from the website, and copy it onto my Oregon. Now I've likely got duplicates in between those files. Probably not usually a big deal, but I intend to correct the coordinates for solved puzzles in GSAK, so those conflicts would be problematic. I also just like knowing how it works.

Has anyone figured out what happens on an Oregon (550 specifically) if a cache is listed in two different loaded GPX files? I created two GPX files, each with only one cache (the same one). I modified the description so that I could tell which version "won", but I haven't been able to pin down the rules. It doesn't seem to be related to filename or file modified date, nor the date of the cache listed in the GPX file. Anyone have any thoughts? Korey

Thanks! I only dabble in web development, but jquery and the google maps API are a pleasure to work with!

Walt: what's the name of that macro? I'd like to try it. Randall: are you talking about visiting the initial link, or later in the app? I've tested on IE 6,7,8, Chrome and Firefox, so I'm guessing the web host was acting up.

Hey all- For quite some time I've been fooling around with trying to find an easy way to draw .1 mile circles around each cache on a map, so that when I'm trying to place a cache I can quickly check for off-limits areas. I wasn't satisfied with the processes out there, so I wrote my own. I figured I might as well share it in case anyone else could find it useful. It's a web application that uses a Google Map. You need to create a GPX file (using a pocket query, GSAK, etc.) and paste the data into a text box, like you can with GPS Visualizer. My app is built for a single purpose, though, so there aren't many options to worry about. I place the app at the link below. I welcome any feedback you have. Geocache Radius Map Thanks, Korey

Thanks all. GSAK and the FindStats macro are giving me lots of good information! That works for what I was after!

Hi all- I'm aware of the web-based stats generators for my cache finds (like http://www.mygeocachingprofile.com), but I was wondering if there was any similar site for summaries and details about my hides... No real reason I want this other than curiosity about what kind of traffic my hides get and which ones are most popular. Thanks, Korey