cns Posted August 1, 2002 Share Posted August 1, 2002 Our family, especically my daughter, (Geography/GIS major at U of MT) is into geocaching. I've been corresponding with Dan at easyGPS and people at Garmin to pull a few loose ends / integration issues together... Now it's your turn... As the popularity of geocaching has spread (thanks to you (Jeremy, GEOCACHING.COM...) and the number of geocaches has grown phenomenally,getting from "point A to point B" has become "work." Here's a scenario... I live in Boise, ID. I'm flying down to Boulder, CO to pick up a new motorcycle in a week+. I want to plan my route home around geochching / geocaches. I go to the CO / WY / ID geocache maps... zoom in, identify sites... NOW, what I REALLY WANT to be able to do is SELECT different sites / points from the different maps and temporarily store them (in a "geocache shopping cart"), so I can: 1. Print out a report / listing all of the sites... coordinates, descriptions, contents... of ALL the SELECTED points / caches... 2. Generate a "custom" .LOC file of just the points I have selected (from the maps)... to pull into EasyGPS and download to my GPS unit, and/or pull into MapSource (or whatever) to display and print maps from... What do you think... ??? Chris Link to comment
+Markwell Posted August 1, 2002 Share Posted August 1, 2002 What you need is the pocket query generator, easyGPS and the Mobi reader. To do that, you need to be a premium member. Select caches in proximity of key points along the way. The pocket query generator will deliver you an EasyGPS file and palm readable file of the pages. Too tired to type any more. Check into it. Markwell Chicago Geocaching Link to comment
+MartyFouts Posted August 1, 2002 Share Posted August 1, 2002 The best compromise for what you want looks sort of like this: pick a series of 'centers' along the route that overlap somewhat, creating a corridor. for each center, get a pocket-query response downloaded to your laptop. on your laptop, merge all the responses into one file. pick through the file and figure out the caches you want, using a laptop viewer. move those to another file. either print, or download to a pocket-organizer, the last file. you can almost sort of kind of do some of that with what's available now in premium member 'pocket query' format, except that: 1) you can only issue 5 'center' queries a day 2) you can't do the merge 3) you can't do the sort/split 4) the format that you get isn't particularly printer friendly 5) the format that you get requires a proprietary reader that seems to cause software problems on a lot of pocket organizers. geocaching.com is sort of working on the proprietary format issue, and has proposed a 90%-there solution to it, in the form of a custom variation of an existing data exchange format. Someone has suggested a rectangular search that would do as an approximation for the 'series of centers' search -- if you can talk jeremey into adding that to the pocket query feature list that would be cool. i'm in the middle of trying to design the software that would allow you to further refine search results on your lap top or pc, and give you the flexibility of chosing which parts of the result you download to your organizer, but I can't put the software together until the non-mobi version of the data is available. i've lobbied geocaching.com to make the open-ebook version of the query results available but Jeremey said no. i've lobbied geocaching.com to make the gpx format open, but it appears that Jeremey is saying no. (I'm confused about the response.) i've asked geocaching.com to clarify the license to allow you to do things like this with the results, but haven't gotten a response. maybe if someone else took up the lobbying it would look less like me being an annoyance and more like something that users besides myself actually want. (I think it's in geocaching.com's interest because anything that makes the query results easier for the user to use reduces the overhead on the server and makes the hobby more accessible to other new users.) Link to comment
cns Posted August 1, 2002 Author Share Posted August 1, 2002 OK... I was unaware of the "Charter Member" access to "pocket queries." Sound like they might be pretty cool. However, "there is more than one way to skin a cat," vis a vis approaching a solution to the scenario I presented. Maps are a visual / graphic medium. I like looking at / exploring maps... (as perhaps "we" all do). Queries aside, which I am familiar with on a variety of levels..., I find it difficult to believe that one could "argue" with the desirablity of the "interface design / capability enhancement" I described..., even it was ONLY available to Charter Members. I'd sign up for that, and probably will anyway. Let's hear it for alternative solutions... BTW... Thanks for the "Not bad, Not Bad..." Marty. [This message was edited by cns on August 01, 2002 at 04:03 PM.] [This message was edited by cns on August 01, 2002 at 04:03 PM.] Link to comment
+Wander Lost Posted August 2, 2002 Share Posted August 2, 2002 This topic of planning caches along a route has been brought up before. I played around a bit and the solution I came up with for me is this: I start by getting my .loc file from geocaching.com. I run it through Geobuddy to save it as a CSV text file. I import that in to Streets & Trips. Then I can 'see' which caches fall near the route I plan on taking. This works good for me. After I identify from the resulting map which caches I want to know more about I just click the link that is imported with the lat & long and go straight to the cache page. If I decide that I want to hunt that cache I change the Icon for that pushpin and save the map. If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?? Link to comment
+Markwell Posted August 2, 2002 Share Posted August 2, 2002 Don't forget that Geocaching.com DOES have maps. Example: search on caches in Illinois. At the top is a link: Visualize: View cache map of Illinois. You can see interstates and county lines. If you're logged in, it will also show which caches you have found (including your own) and which ones you haven't. You can also use the other map source. Markwell Chicago Geocaching Link to comment
+MartyFouts Posted August 2, 2002 Share Posted August 2, 2002 quote:Originally posted by cns:OK... I was unaware of the "Charter Member" access to "pocket queries." Sound like they might be pretty cool. However, "there is more than one way to skin a cat," vis a vis approaching a solution to the scenario I presented. Maps are a visual / graphic medium. I like looking at / exploring maps... (as perhaps "we" all do). Queries aside, which I am familiar with on a variety of levels..., I find it difficult to believe that one could "argue" with the desirablity of the "interface design / capability enhancement" I described..., even it was ONLY available to Charter Members. I'd sign up for that, and probably will anyway. Let's hear it for alternative solutions... BTW... Thanks for the "Not bad, Not Bad..." Marty. [This message was edited by cns on August 01, 2002 at 04:03 PM.] [This message was edited by cns on August 01, 2002 at 04:03 PM.] Doh. of course maps are a good thing, and i was lame to leave them out of my description. it's my opinion, having used Buxley's and geocaching.com's online maps and streets and trips offline that having the info on my pc is far faster way to use the map (and a lot easier on geocaching.com's server.) the one thing i don't think will happen is automagic route-following queries. The sort of map vector database necessary for that info is probably not worth it's price to geocaching.com and the kind of ap necessary to use the database isn't the sort of thing that the gc.com guys want to write, if i remember one of their posts right. marty Link to comment
cns Posted August 6, 2002 Author Share Posted August 6, 2002 Thanks all... for the comments, approaches... Marty, I'm with you on the ante associated with "real" (GIS) spatial query capability... ala ArcView, MapGuide... It would be nice though! Back to my idea / suggestion... scenario... OK, I come to GC.com..., I enter my state... I get "X" hundred caches back @ 25 / page, each with individual checkboxes... Now... from the list... 1) I'd like to be able (have an option) to download ALL the points for the state, without having to do it 25 at a time... page by page. Next... (in another direction / approach) I click on the "View Cache Map" link... to display a map... Zoom in, identify points... In the detailed description page of the cache, there is an option to download the waypoint... Now, instead of downloading one waypoint at a time, wouldn't it be nice to select and store multiple points in a "geocache shopping cart," so that when I'm "done," I could download a single LOC file with multiple points. Displaying an aggregate / filtered description list of the caches (for printing) would also be very helpful. The other side of this equation, convenience-wise, is the fact that, until Dan (EasyGPS) implements the ability to OPEN multiple LOC files in a single operation (which he has told me he is going to do)... you have to OPEN each LOC file individually. So, summing up... I'm not advocating some sophisticated route following spatial query capability... I like selecting individual points, review their descriptions... following my planned route "manually." But, there are enhancements that could be made to improve the integration and connectivity process. Link to comment
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