paulherman

I think I've given the new maps a fair chance to win me over, but they absolutely suck compared to Google. As mentioned in other forum threads, the satellite view is VERY slow to load - almost unusable. And the standard MapQuest street map doesn't include streets in my subdivision that were put in 5 years ago and have had people living on them for 3 years. I am a paying subscriber, and I expect better service than this if you want me to renew my premium membership. If Geocaching.com was a totally free site, I could see why you were crying in your beer about having to pay for map service from Google. But you sell premium memberships, you sell a mobile app, and you sell all kinds of branded merchandise through your on-line store. I suggest you bite the bullet and pay whatever Google wants for its maps before all your members leave. Since Google is basing it's map fee on the number of hits per day, maybe you should think about making Google maps available only to premium members. Let the free users have the worthless maps.

I get the same result with FireFox. If the GeoMate Updater add on is enabled, FireFox won't start the next time you try to open it. You have to start it in safe mode and disable the add on before it works properly again.

Is anyone from Apisphere still monitoring this topic?

It seems like every review of the Geomate Jr. I read concludes that it is a "great GPS device for kids". That's true, but with support for more software upload functions, it could really be a useful, professional quality device. Does Apisphere have any plans of releasing a "software development kit" or API technical details so that programmers can write their own programs to interface to the Geomate? If they did, I'm sure the open source community would develop a host of applications to support more flexible upload schemes - surely a win-win situation for users and Apisphere alike. I'm a professional programmer - and if I had the details about how to communicate with the USB serial port on the device and the format of the upload file, it wouldn't be that hard to develop software to upload information with just the caches I want on the device.

I've had a GeoMate Jr. for over a month now, along with the update kit. It works perfectly and is a lot of fun. But it sure would be nice if you could update it from your own GPX or LOC file. Seems like that would be fairly easy to do from a programming standpoint. Or, if that is not possible ... how about an update option that allows you to load a database of only the caches you HAVE NOT found. This gets more important once you have found most of the caches in your neighborhood. It's not that fun having to click through all the "found" caches to find one you still need to find.