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Paperless Caching - What do you use?

Too Tall John

By Too Tall John
in GPS technology and devices

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Too Tall John

+Too Tall John

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What hardware do you use to store PQ info for use in the field?

  • A Pocket-PC?
  • A Palm-OS PDA?
  • An iPhone or the like?
  • Something else?

In the Wherigo forums (Yes, there are forums for Wherigo!), there has been some requests for a Palm-OS Wherigo player. According to Jeremy, there is no plans to develop one at this time.

 

I think it's make good sense to develop a player for the platform used the most. Pocket-PC has one, the new Colorado comes with one. I'm curious how many people out there use a Palm-based PDA.

 

If you use one, this is your chance to chime in and say so.

 

If you use one of the other already-supported platforms, this is your chance to say "I use this, and think the time would be better spent working out the bugs that already exist!"

 

Why am I posting this in the General Forums and not the Wherigo forums? I'd imagine that the vast majority of people reading the Wherigo forums have the equipment necessary (ie a non-Palm-based PDA) needed to play. I want to see if we can get a cross-section of what people use from the general community. Well, at least from the forum-reading community...

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QC 49ers

+QC 49ers

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I use my i-pod and it works freakin awesome!!

 

I second this. I use my i-pod every day for music so its nice to be able to use the same device for caching. All of the storage space is nice and it is smaller than most pda's i have seen. If you wanna run other applications though a pda is the way to go.

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StarBrand

+StarBrand

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Dell Axim X3 PPC.

 

BTW - you just have to understand that there is a vast difference in the amount of memory, processor power, OS functions, supported programming languages, etc between the 2 platforms. Even if they were able to port it over to a Palm - I suspect it would require vastly more power than most of the Palms have available.

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TheAlabamaRambler

+TheAlabamaRambler

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A new Wherigo was listed today in Alabama.

 

I have listed my Palm Tungsten T5 for sale and will upgrade to a GPS-enabled PPC-based cell phone as soon as it sells... not just for Wherigo, but that will be a nice bonus.

 

As far as a Palm version of Wherigo, I don't know who has what market share, Palm or PPC or whoever, I suspect GS does and is writing the software for the larger market.

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Too Tall John

+Too Tall John

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As far as a Palm version of Wherigo, I don't know who has what market share, Palm or PPC or whoever, I suspect GS does and is writing the software for the larger market.
As the PPC player is already available, the question is where to focus efforts now. It has been suggested that the attention will go to either the iPhone, or Google's platform. One is still locked, the other not even on the market yet. Even if we assume that both will be viable options tomorrow, I suspect the user base of either group would be dwarfed by PalmOS users.

 

Assuming they can develop a viable player for Palm, it would make the most sense to develop the player for the largest user base.

 

The idea of this thread is to see if my assumptions that a majority of users are using Palm.

 

I never answered my own question.

 

I use a Sony Clie TJ-37 (a PalmOS unit) and Cachemate, although I did just load Earthcomber to see what it's about. :)

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CoyoteRed

CoyoteRed

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BTW - you just have to understand that there is a vast difference in the amount of memory, processor power, OS functions, supported programming languages, etc between the 2 platforms. Even if they were able to port it over to a Palm - I suspect it would require vastly more power than most of the Palms have available.

From what I understand the Wherigo player uses Lua for the interpreter and a form of Lua was written for Palm that only requires PalmOS 3.5 and will run on any hardware that supports that OS and has mathlib. I actually suspect the limitations would more than likely be in the size of the cartridge that can be played. Sounds and images would greatly inflate the size of the cartridge. Limitations of color and sound would also limit the experience.

 

However, my view of what most cartridges would be would probably be close to a power point presentation that is triggered to show particular slides depending on location. Compare the number of geocaches that have lots of images and sound to those that do not. I'm thinking most cartridges would have only a few images and few sounds. The play-anywhere cartridges I downloaded aren't very big at all.

 

Also, the basic functions of Wherigo don't appear to do much heavy lifting. Probably the most difficult, I'm guessing, is the math to determine if the coordinates it is reading is within any of the zones in the cartridge. IIRC, I've played games on my m105 that seem to require heavier math than that.

 

Personally, other than a super, media rich experience I don't see that the older Palms have the limitations for playing Wherigo as folks appear to think it does.

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carleenp

+carleenp

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A long time ago I used a palm, but I didn't care for it much because it was slow and clunky. So I generally stopped using it. Instead I would just load up the GPS and hope I didn't really need to look at a cache page.

 

Now I use a Mio 550 Pocket PC, but I bought that in part for Wherigo. I like it much better for caching than my old Palm, but I think all PDAs were likely slow and clunky back then, so I have no idea if I would like the Palm platform better now.

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DaRkBoDoM

+DaRkBoDoM

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Posted (edited)

I use CompeGPS with my PPC, it's not specifically designed for geocaching, but it's useful 'cause it lets me to load military area maps and use them as reference when looking for some road path to try getting as close as possible to caches inside woods by car and to have an idea of where I am.

 

I get all the nearest caches that I haven't found in gpx format on my mailbox every Friday (using pocket queries), then I wrote a script which automatically converts the gpx file into a CompeGPS waipoint file (.wpt) and then it generates a folder with html files containing updated caches' descriptions (with logs, number of TBs in the cache, etc...).

 

Then I just have to connect my PPC to my PC to let it sync and I automagically got an updated list of all the caches of my interest in my hand :D

Edited by DaRkBoDoM
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Too Tall John

+Too Tall John

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So, for those playing along at home, the current score is:

 

Palm - 10 (+1 about to run a Palm with Linux.)

 

PPC - 9 (including PPC phones)

 

Cellphone - 2

 

i-pod - 3

 

I counted The Alabama Rambler in with PPC users as he states his owning a PPC is imminent.

 

It's way too early to call at this point, 24 responses isn't in any way representative.

 

People are being nice and specific so far. Please, when answering, don't just say "cellphone," especially if the phone is the iPhone, or (when it comes out) the Google platform, Android.

 

:o

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clevek

+clevek

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I just started in november 2007, obviously I've adopted what I learned from the friend that introduced me to the sport: Cachemate for an old Palm Pilot PDA. Most people these days carry a cell phone and I must admit, if I could do what I do now with Cachemate and Palm Pilot PDA on the cell phone I carry everythwere, I would if I could but right now i can't so i won't. paperless caching is the way to go, tho

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DanTheMan81

+DanTheMan81

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I use my iPhone for paperless caching. I just print the pages from geocaching.com as PDFs and send them to emails as myself. After that I open the PDFs before I leave to "save" them locally in the Mail program. Also it is strongly suggested that the SDK (software developer kit) will be released this Thursday as Apple has a special event scheduled that day. When that happens program will be able to be developed to run natively on the iPhone instead of them having to be web based. And as we all know some places where caches are hidden there is definitely isn't any WiFi and cell service can be limited. Finger crossed this happen soon........

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victorymike

+victorymike

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I started paperless caching long before the days of GSAK (in late 2001...maybe early 2002) on my expensive HP Jornada 680 PPC.

 

Then I transitioned to a very cheap Palm iiixe with Cachemate and GSAK. It worked great and I really loved it. I still do. but I gave it to my sister when I:

 

Upgraded to an expensive Palm LifeDrive and Cachemate automatically transferred over. Didn't use half the features it offered. Had battery problems. Case problems. It eventually died.

 

I downgraded to a Palm Tungsten e2 and Cachemate, once again, automatically transferred over. It works nicely. I've loaded lots of geocaching pictures onto it in addition to some conversion programs, calculators, and other helpful programs. I play a lot of backgammon on it.

 

I just got the new Colorado 400t. You may have heard of people's complaints here in these forums...but I really like mine and it works well for me. I might still carry my Palm for various other features. Conversion factors and stuff I have in there that has been helpful on other cache hunts.

Edited by victorymike
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J10fly

+J10fly

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I use my iPhone for paperless caching. I just print the pages from geocaching.com as PDFs and send them to emails as myself. After that I open the PDFs before I leave to "save" them locally in the Mail program. Also it is strongly suggested that the SDK (software developer kit) will be released this Thursday as Apple has a special event scheduled that day. When that happens program will be able to be developed to run natively on the iPhone instead of them having to be web based. And as we all know some places where caches are hidden there is definitely isn't any WiFi and cell service can be limited. Finger crossed this happen soon........

 

If the SDK is like that it would be nice but rumor has it, it wont be that developer friendly. That's why I run a web server on my phone so I export from GSAK w/pictures right to the server directory on my phone. Works nice cause i have an index file to link each of my queries I run. :)

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Too Tall John

+Too Tall John

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It sure would be nice if Wherigo worked what whatigot. :D
Heh... I like it, kinda catchy...

 

So, rather than having to tally up a big bunch of posts once in a while, I'm opting to try and keep it current.

 

Palm - 17 (This includes Palm-based cells, ie Treos)

 

PPC - 11 (including PPC phones)

 

iPhone - 2

 

Cellphone - 2

 

i-pod - 6

 

Colorado - 1

 

So far, with less than one percent of the votes counted, it looks like the candidates are...

 

:)

 

Oh, wait... this isn't the primaries. Sorry... :D

 

As I was saying, so far, the 2 "most used" categories are the Palm platform and the PPC. Call the PPC group the "Already Has a Wherigo Player Available" and you can lump the Colorado into that group, too for a total of 12 users so far. Palm has 17.

 

This is, of course, with only 39 votes counted...

 

I must say, I'm impressed with the number of people using their iPods. A versatile little unit...

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