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GSAK is now Freeware


K13

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17 hours ago, K13 said:

I've not used that product, but I guess I can now see what all the fuss is about.

 

You could do that before. It was a long time before the nag screen made it too annoying.

Without GSAK I would probably have given up on geocaching, especially after all the "improvements" of the website.

 

Edited by on4bam
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18 minutes ago, on4bam said:

 

You could do that before. It was a long time before the nag screen made it to annoying.

 

 

My nag screen was up to about 20 minutes.  I'd buy a new PC and have "14 days" to try it again, and I'd challenge myself to get up and running on GSAK in that 14 days.  And then I'd get stuck on some setting or interface issue.  And then I'd decide that old-fashioned Pocket Queries or whatever are tolerable, and forget about GSAK until some Event showed some cool stuff to try in GSAK.  At that point, every change to a setting then required a wait of another 20 minutes.

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Or you know, you could have just dropped a few bucks to support the developer and app ;) It was totally worth it, imo.  I don't ever recall getting to an unbearable nag length though; I don't remember it even growing that much.  Weird. Ah well. V9 is the latest and last version, as far as the announcement indicates.  Definitely worth having if the website doesn't do everything you want for organizing and planning.

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1 hour ago, thebruce0 said:

Or you know, you could have just dropped a few bucks to support the developer and app ;) It was totally worth it, imo.

We started geocaching in 2006 (late April), paid for PM immediately and paid for GSAK July 7th 2006 for V7, later I paid for V8. A total of about €40 for 13 years use, not too bad for such a product B) (and great support).

 

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Well, a few things...

* GSAK is flexible in many areas

* Community is still there to help and adjust where possible and if needed

* At worst, if gsak simply breaks at the basest level and needs an update to fix it, I'd be saddened if there'd be no efforts to adopt the source code so someone else can make edits and redistribute a new version.

I wonder how GSAK might change were it to become open source...

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21 minutes ago, FunnyNose said:

Now that Clyde isn't supporting it will that mean that the first major change or even a minor one that Groundspeak might make somewhere will make GSAK useless ?

 

Clyde is NOT stopping support. GSAK will remain supported for at least a year .

Info by Clyde himself:

Quote

Some items to note:

1. Support will be continued, for now, via volunteers on the forums.
2. Patches/fixes will continue (for now and subject to my post stroke coding abilities)
3. I (GSAK author) will still make posts in these forums (for now)
4. Anything to do with this forum will be the responsibility of administrators (but not Clyde)
5. The GSAK server will stay up for at least 1 year (from the date of this post)
6. All this is subject to disasters and/or unforeseen circumstances.
 

 

So no panic, yet.

 

Maybe GSAK can continue later the way other software I used continued after the author had a serious traffic accident... the source code was transferred to a few volunteers and put in the public domain. That way updates an fixes were put out and it's now again a healthy piece of software .

 

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27 minutes ago, FunnyNose said:

Now that Clyde isn't supporting it will that mean that the first major change or even a minor one that Groundspeak might make somewhere will make GSAK useless ?

 

Without access to the source code this is the case. GS is known to change even such API calls that are not supposed to change, rendering working but unsupported apps useless or difficult to use. We are just now middle of such migration process from the old to the new API.  But if the source code is available then it is different case.

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10 minutes ago, on4bam said:

Maybe GSAK can continue later the way other software I used continued after the author had a serious traffic accident... the source code was transferred to a few volunteers and put in the public domain. That way updates an fixes were put out and it's now again a healthy piece of software .

 

Yep, that's what we can hope for if Clyde does it. But I know of one very wonderful application where the developer has gone AWOL and no one is able to continue development because the source code isn't open sourced and held entirely by him. :(  Hopefully this doesn't happen in the long run with GSAK.

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On 5/14/2019 at 12:30 PM, niraD said:

A Mac OS version would be nice.

It would have been nice, but I just bought a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad (to replace a dead Lenovo notebook) for $185 to get back to using GSAK.  Well worth it.  And, it runs faster than my Macbook Pro!  Which I'm also replacing.......

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6 minutes ago, hzoi said:

 

And a major update, v9, just dropped.  The sky has not in fact fallen.

Not a "major" update at all. It is an update V8 to V9 (which looks major) but there are only minor changes to the workings of GSAK. The big thing is the change to freeware. The next update is removal of error logs and 9.0.0.2 is a small bugfix.

 

 

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11 minutes ago, on4bam said:
24 minutes ago, hzoi said:

And a major update, v9, just dropped.  The sky has not in fact fallen.

Not a "major" update at all. It is an update V8 to V9 (which looks major) but there are only minor changes to the workings of GSAK. The big thing is the change to freeware. The next update is removal of error logs and 9.0.0.2 is a small bugfix.

OK.  I revise my statement: an update has just dropped.  And, more importantly, other GSAK developers have indicated they will be helping Clyde continue to keep GSAK going.

 

Sky's still up there.

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5 minutes ago, hzoi said:

OK.  I revise my statement: an update has just dropped.  And, more importantly, other GSAK developers have indicated they will be helping Clyde continue to keep GSAK going.

 

Sky's still up there.

 

Yes it is B)

 

I hoped in time the source code would be in the public domain but reading how GSAK was written and what tools were used to write it that won't happen. For the time being GSAK will live on and will be usable for a long time. Maybe someone will come along and (re)write code for a new version or even completely new program like GSAK (64bit/mac version?). Time will tell.

 

No time to panic yet :)

 

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On 5/18/2019 at 2:06 AM, on4bam said:

 

Yes it is B)

 

I hoped in time the source code would be in the public domain but reading how GSAK was written and what tools were used to write it that won't happen. For the time being GSAK will live on and will be usable for a long time. Maybe someone will come along and (re)write code for a new version or even completely new program like GSAK (64bit/mac version?). Time will tell.

 

No time to panic yet :)

 

 

While the UI doesn't use code that is easily open-sourced, the databases themselves are the very available SQLite.  I can load data into GSAK either via PQs or via the GS API and then slice and dice it to my heart's content.  I agree that the UI is nice, and I use it, but the access is there for those who want to build on it.  Sadly, the macro language is truly horrific (and non-standard) but I am constantly amazed at what some of the wizards have made it do!

 

Just tonight I wrote a little SQL to find caches with the same name but different GC numbers for my finds, and accessed it without ever opening GSAK.

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1 minute ago, SwineFlew said:

The status check used to be free and unlimited. Now it steal my balance points.  

Blame the API - not GSAK. Unfortunately the New API does not have a core status check (like the old API had) without consuming your balance.

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54 minutes ago, SwineFlew said:

The status check used to be free and unlimited. Now it steal my balance points.  

 

It does so with every API partner, it's a GS thing, not GSAK. Besides, you're getting 16000 full API calls now instead of 6000.

 

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On 5/22/2019 at 3:19 AM, fizzymagic said:

Just tonight I wrote a little SQL to find caches with the same name but different GC numbers for my finds, and accessed it without ever opening GSAK.

 

Ditto. My SQLite interface has pages and pages of single-line queries that I use to determine challenge cache qualifications from MyFinds, or to list caches I can target for challenges from my other databases. Likewise, there are time when I dno't use the gsak interface at all, and get all I need from a sql query result :)  That said, the GSAK interface does occasionally make complex search queries a quick task (especially having that extra "where" tab for custom special parameters)

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