Offline Descriptions

[+Risen]

I've been enjoying Geocaching since mid-summer this year and have logged over 70 finds so far. I'm loving it! I recently took a road trip with a friend across the country and did some caching along the way. Now he's hooked as well. I am now a supporting premium member.

Since we were going to be in different areas of the country with limited internet connections, I was hoping that the pocket queries would be useful in giving us along-the-road descriptions. My friend has a Mac laptop. (We had a small ordeal to get the GPS connected to it, though that is another matter entirely — which we managed to solve.) The next challenge was getting descriptions to carry with us. We tried using the pocket queries, but we could never seem to get them to open! We do not have a palm, and the Mobipocket reader for PC always said the file was corrupt, even though the GPX file in the same ZIP worked perfectly. We ended up using a website downloader program to get the first 20 descriptions, but it wouldn't go past that and getting other data was difficult. We couldn't help but wonder why this somewhat obscure format was chosen over, say, PDF, which can be easily read on nearly all platforms.

Some form of offline description review that can be easily downloaded and viewed on all platforms would be ideal, even if such were done in plain text. I would understand if this were offered as a premium-only feature. Are any such features planned in the future? If not, please regard this message as a feature request.

[+ClayJar]

Actually, you just described the GPX in your Pocket Query. It's just XML text. If you were on Windows, you could use Watcher for that (several long distance cachers use Watcher and their GPX files as a portable Geocaching.com). Since you're on Mac, the situation's not the same, but there are Mac users around that should be able to help you.