GeOrg for Android

[+Surrehuene]

Hi

 

I was browsing the Android Market the other day and found a new geocaching app for Android phones. It is called GeOrg and I think this is the best android app right now. I havent had any crashes yet and it is working better and is more intuitive than any other GC apps I have used on my phone. It runs circles around both Geobeagle and Cachemate.

 

There's also a connector option for integrating with geocaching.com, but you have to make this connector yourself, which is quite easy. I spent this weekend making a connector of my own and it is working great. I can now "Find nearby" caches and also display map with caches on. Just like in the iphone app.

 

Check out http://www.ranitos.de/.

 

My caching fun has gotten way better this weekend.

Edited October 11, 2009 by Surrehuene

[+Maeglin]

Never mind the fact that its GC.com "connector" potentially breaks the site's terms of service.

[+user13371]

Maeglin, does GC have a way to spot & disable such connectors? Would be a good reason to avoid such an app.

[+Maeglin]

Not unless they use an identifiable user agent string when making such requests... if they do at all. A request pattern could also be recognized, I'd think, but it would be tougher.

 

In any case, all that they'd need to do to disable it would be to kill the account of the user. That's easy enough to find once the offending requests are identified.

[rflexor]

Hi,

 

you don't have to use any connectors, GeOrg runs perfectly well without them. They are not part of the app you can buy in the Android Market.

 

As to Groundspeak's Terms of Service:

I don't believe that the behaviour of the sample-connector - which we only published in source, for developers interested in providing access to external datasources and which is independent from GeOrg - is against their Terms of Service. But I don't know for sure.

 

That's why I asked them. Repeatedly. Sadly they would not reply.

 

This is from our site (link):

 

To give you a feeling about the potential of the Connector-mechanism we decided to provide some functionality in our sample that’s to some extend usable and not just some cheap “Hello GeOrg”-stuff.

 

It’s basically a connector to the Groundspeak-website. It uses their GoogleMaps-Mashup JSON-Interface to find caches and allows for downloading GPX from the site.

 

It behaves just like a (very specialised) browser and only connects to Groundspeak upon user-interaction and within a normal traffic-range. Thus it can’t be called a spider, bot or crawler and so might be ok according to Groundspeaks Terms of Use. There is no official statement from Groundspeak though, so use it at your own risk.

 

Also the interface used here is not officially documented. It may be subject to sudden change or cease to exist altogether. Don’t rely on this code in any way.

 

Be aware that ranitos don’t distribute this sample as part of GeOrg. Nor do we encourage the use of the sample on your device except as a demonstration of the Connector-mechanism. As to support, we’ll give you support for the basic Connector-mechanism itself but not for the concrete functionality of this sample.

 

[...]

 

The sample code and everything within the connector-sample.zip-archive is public domain. Use it however you wish at your own risk.

 

If Groundspeak should ask us to modify or remove the access to their site from our sample-code, then we will of course do that.

 

rflexor

Edited October 12, 2009 by rflexor