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Agrajag27

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Everything posted by Agrajag27

  1. Now that I'm getting the hang of this I will become a premium member. FYI, GFX files are not available to me as a basic member. The button is there but grayed-out so that option isn't open to me. I've since decided it's probably best to move beyond c.geo given the orphaned state and have now been using the official app. It is force-closing on me but when it's working I find it quite impressive. Much more so than the reviews would have led me to believe. Thanks so much for all the input. Next up I need to decide if I want to do something like calling cards. I don't want to be dragging junk around and I feel bad not leaving anything (I haven't taken anything either and even fixed one toy car in a cache that had broken wheels). Then I think, what am I going to leave that anyone would want? And then what can I leave that won't cost me a fortune to have hundreds of them handy? Trackers sound fun but at $5 a pop I'm not going to go around putting those in most caches. I thought it might be neat to have plastic coins around that are cute but don't cost a bunch.
  2. The official app will do just fine then. It's amazing that other apps are sold so cheaply that $10 seems like a lot. This isn't a PC. That's the difference. The business model and metrics clearly shows you can make a lot more money in the volume business than on charging a higher amount and limiting your sales. Imagine if this was $1.99. How many people do you think would gripe? I bought it last night but after much gritting of teeth. See Weatherbug for a classic success example. They were charging $30 for a PC app about the weather and finding it hard to get anywhere. Then they went to the cheap phone model and now they're everywhere and making a great income. I don't care how big the target audience is. Reaching a higher percentage of them via a lower price in most every analysis results in more sales and higher profit. I will also say, as the new kid on the block, that it's disappointing to see so little response to this thread from the people behind Geocaching. If this is their business and they're not Google (too big to be able to provide the personal touch) then they should be all over this posting and reassuring people.
  3. I'm a brand-new entrant so I wanted to share my views on this. I've spent hundreds on apps for my phone but $10 for an app was a bit much especially when you read rather questionable reviews of the app. I then found lots of pointers to c.geo. I downloaded it. I went on two hunts and didn't find the first but found the second. The second one came about only due to c.geo having a live list of caches and thus we bounced here once we realized we weren't going to find this one before the light ran out. I'm an old tech guy with lots of experience coding, managing coders (in the games an multimedia industries) and in network architecture. I now do marketing. My point is that all of that tells me that this situation is not a good one. Had I know about the strife and chaos going on with this hobby I'd have avoided it entirely. Groundspeak has the data and it appears they're holding it hostage (in my view) and forcing people that want to experience this hobby to pony up for a website user interface that's confusing to newbies and for an app that is clearly inferior to other entries including free ones. I come from the small business side and it's clear Groundspeak is not making a lot so resources are tight but that's no excuse for creating an untenable situation of making new entrants feel as if they need to jump through fire-laden hoops to enjoy this hobby. That's exactly how I felt getting started. I owe c.geo for making my first experience a fun one. If anything perhaps Groundspeak should have a chat with the dev of c.geo and work out some sort of arrangement unless their view is that he's unstable and, based on his blog entry, I wouldn't exactly rule that out. The bottom line is that they have an app that clearly isn't meeting the needs of many and they're charging a premium for it while also making it pretty necessary to pay for a premium membership here. That doesn't put people in the best mindset starting out. The last thing they need added to this is strife and that's what I'm seeing. Phew. Now back to trying to figure out how best to proceed. Geez, all I wanted was an app that could take my zip code and load up all the local caches (without having to first feed it) and then go off hunting. Is that really asking for too much?
  4. Hello everyone. A friend sent me an article that mentioned Geocaching and it sounded terrific. I was so taken with the idea that I started reading up at work today and when I got home I had both c.geo and GeOrg on my Android phone (first gen Droid). I thought about the app from here but the reviews were iffy and it's the most expensive one. I cannot understand GeOrg and I'm an old network admin and tech nut so that's concerning but c.geo wasn't too bad to traverse and it pointed me to a cache area I know well--a very old covered wooden bridge. The terrain is 1.0 but the issue was the difficulty was a 4.0 and this being my first search I figured I'd have trouble. My son came along (16) and was also taken with the idea. We searched for an hour to no avail when I figured we'd try another cache. There we were driving the car using the compass in the app going into a neighborhood next to ours but that I'd not been in only to find a wonderfully scenic woodsy area and after a 100m walk and 10 minutes of searching we found the cache, added an entry to the log and headed home like two toddlers with ice cream cones. My first question is, are these apps decent for the task? Second, the compass was all over the place at times especially at the end. Is it the phones or do even the dedicated GPS units do that? Also, GPX files for GeOrg. Is it true that really the only clean way to generate them is to spend $30 a year for the Premium membership here? Plus even with that I didn't see where on the site you go to generate them. Lastly, what sort of things should I bring along? I realized after the fact that I didn't bring a pen (thankfully a pencil was in the cache) and the box was full. Not sure what I could have put in there. I read about coins and such (assume those are the Trackers I've read about) but no such item existed here.
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