ZeroOne

I have still been updating my application and since the last message it has been moved from an SVN repository in Google Code to a Mercurial repository in Bitbucket. A readily compiled binary is still available for download, in addition to the source code. The application can now, for example, output its results as HTML pages instead of only some .txt files.

I know it's going to take a long time before this feature is implemented, if ever, but I cannot find the mystery caches if I don't know in which ones I have the solved coordinates in the first place...

Not a solution once you have already made those annotations, but thanks for the suggestion anyway. Not a big fan of bookmark lists anyway as they show you virtually no information about the caches, not even the D/T ratings. There's another place where there's room for improvement here. Basic members cannot even do bookmark lists (or am I wrong?) so this wouldn't work for them. Wait, can they even add those annotations?

Hello! Please modify the cache listing pages so that they somehow show you if you have either set custom coordinates for a cache of if you have added a personal cache note to a cache. I'm thinking the Info column, where you just have the occasional "Premium only" or "Needs maintenance" icon. You should then, of course, also be able to sort by that column in order to easily find the caches where you have made annotations. As far as I know, currently it is impossible to get a list of caches where you have your own annotations.

Well, darn. I had hoped it would alert me about that somewhere in the cache listing pages, perhaps in the Info column where there's the occasional "Premium only" or "Needs maintenance" icon. I'm off to the Feature Suggestions forum, then...

I have recently solved or attempted to solve some mystery caches from another city before traveling there. I have marked the solutions as corrected coordinates and/or personal cache notes on the cache pages. Now, how do I find the caches to which I have made my own annotations?? Either on the map or as a listing. Looking at all the mystery caches in the area one by one is not an option.

Hello again! I learned about these kind of challenge caches where you have to find three different types of caches from ten different cache owners, or something similar. It didn't occur to me how you could check this easily using just the geocaching.com site, so I improved my own program. Download your My Finds Pocket Query and input it to my program, and you'll get an owners.txt file out. Open that in your favorite spreadsheet program, and you'll get a nice list of cache owners along with information on how many caches are theirs and what types of caches have they hidden.

Yeah, this is a must. I was dumbfounded when I had just gone through a lot of trouble creating a certain bookmark list of mystery caches, and once I viewed the list I had created, I couldn't see their difficulty ratings!!

After reviewing some caches I decided that there probably isn't a list like this, so I created my own. For that, I quickly reviewed some 200 mystery caches within an approximately 10 km radius from the center of Paris. I did not include caches where there's just a picture as the description, they would belong to some other bookmark list. Let me know if I missed anything or if I have added caches which cannot be solved without the knowledge of French!

Hello! I'm about to travel to Paris, France, and naturally geocaching will be playing a big role on the trip. It would be nice to solve some local mystery caches in advance, but unfortunately not many of them seem to have a description in any language that I know. Google Translate also often does a suboptimal job of translating the descriptions so I'd rather not bother myself with that. So, my question is: is there a bookmark list of those mystery caches in Paris that have a description in English? I was about to start collecting one myself but I figured I'd ask first in order to avoid doing duplicate work. If there isn't one already then feel free to suggest caches for the list!

Oh, well, my bad. It doesn't find the lib\joda-time-2.0.jar file. For me it's there so I didn't come across that problem, although it should be obvious... Sorry. So try this: get the new distribution package, unzip it and try to run it like before. Let me know how that works for you.

Hey, thanks for trying out my program! There's your problem: it's a Java 7 program. It is using some of those new tricks Java 7 provides and cannot be compiled or ran with Java 6, so you need to update your Java.

Greetings. I wrote a little Java program to parse caches from Groundspeak .gpx files into Java objects and then into a tab-delimited text file. In this format it is easy to explore cache data in, say, a spreadsheet program. The program and its source code are available as an MIT-licensed Google Code project. You can either checkout the source and compile it with Apache Ant, or you can just download the pre-compiled .jar file and run it with "java -jar GeoGPXParser.jar somefile.gpx" or "java -jar GeoGPXParser.jar some/directory/with/gpx/files". The output is written into caches.txt into the directory in which you executed the program. Let me know what you think of the program. It was made for my own needs but I figured someone else might find it useful as well and thus decided to publish it. So far it only distinguishes between traditional caches, multi-caches and mystery caches, grouping all the rest into a category called "Other", but for my purposes this was enough.

6 metriä on kännygepsille jo melkein sama kuin nollapiste, siinä vaiheessa voi jo laittaa sen luurin taskuun ja alkaa katsella ympäristöä. Erityisesti metsässä kaikki kännygepseilijät tuntevat ilmiön, että menit tietyllä alueella ihan mihin tahansa, purkille on aina 15 metriä matkaa. ;P c:geossa kannattaa muuten todennäköisesti vaihtaa se Google-kartta OSM: Mapnik -kartaksi asetuksista. OpenStreetMap eli OSM sopii ainakin asutuilla seuduilla kätköilyyn paremmin, sillä siihen on piirretty paljon pieniäkin polkuja joita Google-kartoista ei löydy. Eri kartta- tai kätköilysoftatkin voivat näyttää sijaintisi eri tavoin esimerkiksi keskiarvottamalla sitä jos et liiku (tai ennakoimalla sijaintiasi jos liikut!). c:geoa enemmän pidän itse Neongeosta. En tiedä onko siinä juuri tällä alueella eroa c:geoon mutta muuten sen käyttölogiikka vain sopii paremmin yhteen oman logiikkani kanssa. Kaikki softat näyttävät kyllä myös sijainnin tarkkuuden, c:geossa ainakin kompassinäkymän alalaidassa tyyliin "+/- 15 m". Olen ollut huomaavinani että tätä epätarkkuutta saatetaan joskus liioitellakin, mutta jos siinä tosiaan lukee että +/- 40 metriä niin kyllä sen purkin löytymisen kanssa siinä vaiheessa voi olla aika hiljaista.

What would you like to see on the home page (or the "My Page") if you could customize it? Fair enough. Is the "My Profile" page perfect already then, or would you like to see any improvements done there?

Very true. By the way, did you notice that they rearranged those "My page" tools a little when they introduced the favorites? The "Your GPS" box was moved significantly down, for one, and that's a good start. Anyway, I have now created yet another mockup of what the homepage slash my page could look like. This time I added those premium tools there. Non-premium members would see some other links or no links at all, or maybe each member could customize the links to their own taste:

We've been through this already: for all I care, the homepage can stay exactly as it is for the non-logged in users. I just think the members deserve something better and requiring them to navigate away from the homepage to the "My page" seems like a waste of mouse clicks. Also, for those people who don't have the home coordinates set the related information just wouldn't be shown. Maybe people don't know about home coordinates and there could be a small reminder for them? They are more than welcome to adapt the suggestions from this thread to the "my" page as well. Yes, that's a good idea!

Yes, that'd be great. I think it would be easier for Groundspeak to do the former, i.e. choosing from a list of sections from your preferences. The iGoogle-likeness would just be a slight improvement over that one. Thanks! I think you are only proving my point that something needs to be done. Seasoned users know where everything is, but newbies get lost at the site and the homepage does not help them a bit.

Yeah, I ran out of it after about the tenth message discussing whether we should have moderators in the forums.

Sure, and you can also opt-out of commenting on this thread if you have nothing constructive to say.

And here's another new mockup, I added the map based on a suggestion in the feedback forum:

Here's a new mockup based on the feedback -- click to enlarge: Well, for those people the related information just wouldn't be shown. Maybe people don't know about home coordinates and there could be a small reminder for them? They are free to use the ideas from this thread to improve that page also. I disagree with this. See facebook.com when you are logged in and when you are logged out. It's two entirely different pages. I'm giving out ideas on how the geocaching.com home page should look like for the members. For all I care it could stay exactly the same for the non-members. Actually, me neither, so I've changed my suggestion to "Newest caches" instead. If you don't have home coordinates set then it wouldn't show you anything.

I still don't get it. Does this comment have something to do with my original suggestion about a better geocaching.com homepage?

You are right. I remember when I got the premium membership and tried to find the much hyped pocket queries. You'd think they'd put a link to them to somewhere where you'd easily find them, but nope! Trackables are another badly overlooked area. There's an improvement suggestion for them in the feedback forum, too. You should be able to retrieve a trackable from a cache when writing your log, just like you can drop a trackable into a cache when writing your log. This is the kind of interface I'd like to see: (Click to enlarge.)

Again, those were just some ideas. Besides, it already takes that much prime real estate on the page. I don't want the Welcome message any more than you do but, like you said, it seems that people want to have that thing there: In my opinion the homepage could look very different to logged-in users and to the general public. For all I care it could look exactly the same to the general public as it does now, but it should be rendered differently to the actual users of the site. It's called homepage so why couldn't it be used as such? Instead, everyone is using the profile page as their homepage. Yeah, if they choose to implement those to the profile page then that'd be good too. jameyp also had a good idea that instead of nearest unfound caches it should show the newest, nearest caches. The layout I created is just an idea, you shouldn't take it too literally.