Master Shifu

I don’t really care who makes the app or how much it cost.... if an app is out there that has spontaneous live caching, that will be the app I will use, period. If ones don’t exist in the future I think it will slow the progress of the game and turn many people off to it. Once you get your method down, your going to want to stick to it. There is no reason for technology to move backwards or be stunted in any way. Software should run as good and have has many options as the hardware allows it to. A new breed of players has emerged and they know what they want…. I don’t see a reason not to give them what they want and what they are used to. Some people prefer to use a standard GPS unite which they are accustomed to, and that’s fine. They should be allowed to cache in the way they are used to. Some people prefer to use an android phone and have spontaneous live caching, I believe that is also fine and they should be allowed to do so. If c:geo doesn’t want to continue to update their produce to allow spontaneous live caching (which is fine and is their choice), this should be seen as a “golden egg” for Groundspeak to make their app function in this way…. They will make a lot of money in the process. If they give the people what they want, their app will them become the standard geocaching app (which it should be). The only reason I haven’t purchased the GS app is because it’s lacking this ability. I have no issue with purchasing an app that gives me what I want. I do it for my computer, so why would I not do it for me phone?

I'm not 100% clear about that sentence, but rest assured, GC doesn't want their application calling up hundreds of web pages and scraping the data to present in their application, either. There's nothing about the 'scraping' that is desirable from their end. Whether GC is able to duplicate all of the features of C:GEO will in part be a function of whether their own API gives them direct access to enough information to do so without scraping pages. It's not the act of 'scraping' that costs the GC website anything - it's the act of calling up all of the pages to get the data to scrape in the first place. The API provides a more direct and very abbreviated (and possibly not even human readable) version of the requisite data without the enormous overhead of producing a pretty HTML page for you to look at along with it. So c:geo's scraping function is just a work around for not having the ability or rights to directly access groundspeaks database to acquire the info needed for all the extra options & info it provides over the other geocaching apps that aren't breaking the TOU?

No, they won't, because it won't be necessary. All of the overhead involved in dumping out a screen full of html will be gone since the API should provide direct access to the data that underlies those screens in the first place. It becomes the client's job to manage presentation of that data, not GC's web site. Helps to understand how this stuff is architected before diving in... Sounds like the update is just what were looking for then. If that's the case and it makes thing super easy for 3 party app developers to give us all the options were looking for then we should be seeing some nice geocaching app's popping up in the market As I said before, it helps... Just how well featured either GS or any 3rd party developer's application CAN be is going to be limited by what hooks are provided into the data base. The more information that is made available, the more features one can build into an application. As has been noted, C:GEO had features that the GS application did not. This could be a matter of the authors of the GC application just not being creative enough, or it could be that even the GC developers have not yet had access to the database in a sufficiently thorough way to create the features that C:GEO created from scraping the data from individual pages at gc.com. We don't have any real visibility to that out here. I don't know much about this kind of stuff (I know I know... it shows).... but it seems to me that since c:geo's app is open source and the maker has already posted the code\files (https://github.com/carnero/c-geo) then GS could theoretically just steal and edit it to make their app's futures similar to that of c:geo (mainly the data scraping).

No, they won't, because it won't be necessary. All of the overhead involved in dumping out a screen full of html will be gone since the API should provide direct access to the data that underlies those screens in the first place. It becomes the client's job to manage presentation of that data, not GC's web site. Helps to understand how this stuff is architected before diving in... Sounds like the update is just what were looking for then. If that's the case and it makes thing super easy for 3 party app developers to give us all the options were looking for then we should be seeing some nice geocaching app's popping up in the market

So will Groundspeak eventually allow "screen scraping" and "live maps" for their own application? That sure would make a lot of people happy.... and encourage users to buy the Groundspeak app. Then they could take all the new profits from the 10 buck app (that everyone now will love because it works how we want it) and drop it into their database and bandwidth to make the “screen scraping slow’s the site down” argument\issue go away.

Yes. Try using GeoHunter. It is also "free" and doesn't violate the Groundspeak TOU. Yup, this info is wrong... it can't do what I asked above. There is no live map. You have to go onto your phones web browser and then pick a cache, then download it to your map. And you can't post your log find in the program as well (like you can with c:geo), you have to go back to your web browser to do so.... i belive, just started using it after the above poster said "yes" to my questions so i'm still trying to figure it out.

i do understand the argument that if it's made to free and to easy than people might start messing\stealing caches.. people have the access to it that don't care for it or share the same love we all do for it. Haveing c:geo only work for premium members would prob solve that issue though. I just wish Groundspeak would hire the guy that made c:geo to make their official app. Then it would be worth the 10 bucks.

c:geo being free isn't why people use it... many people are saying "everyone wants something for free", and that's not the case. Ask any c:geo user and they will tell you that they would gladly pay for the app to be able to keep using it and have it updated regularly. I'm new to geocaching so I haven't tried tones of apps, but I know what I like and what I don't like. People in the thread keep saying that everyone's overreacting to c:geo not continuing its support and updates because there are plenty of other grate apps to use. My thing is this… can the other app’s allow you to open a satellite map view and see all the geocaches around you, then click on a button and have the compass view, then click on another button and be able to see all the information about the cache (the owners info, descriptions, the log's made), then one more click to log your find? This is a real question because I haven’t tried all of the ones people are mentioning (I just use c:geo cause it works). Or, do all the other app’s require you to open an empty map, then open your browser to look at cache listings, then click one, then download it to your map, then flip back to your geocaching app to go find it, then flip back and forward between your app and the GS website to read the log if you need help? Then after you’ve found it go back onto the website to log the find? Cutting out all those extra steps is what makes c:geo such a grate app… not that it’s free. If I’m wrong and there’s other apps that also cut out all the flipping back and forward between the web and the app then I’d love to hear about it because that’s the one I’ll use when c:geo stops working.