With my relatively recent aquisition of an iPhone (well, last few months anyway), I’ve found that I’ve been accessing www.geocaching.com a fair bit on it whilst out and about.  

Those who’ve tried geocaching will probably know that one of the major limiting factors to ‘on-the-go’ caching is accessing the information about each cache.  The original idea was that you find the cache on the Geocaching website, and print out the information about it to take with you when you go out to find it.  This info may have clues as to its whereabouts, or just general interesting info on the cache location.  However, its usually required in some form or another.  

‘On-the-go’ caching requires that you have access to several things :-

1. A GPSr preloaded with the caches for the area you’re in.
2. Access in one way or another to the info on those caches. 

Effectively, this enables you to whip out your GPSr, find the nearest caches, and use your iPhone to look up the details.  

The first part is fairly simple.  You just have to be prepared enough to upload a PocketQuery GPX file containing all the caches to your GPSr via your favorite caching app.  There are quire a few of these available.  I use GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife) on the PC (via VMware on my Mac), as there doesn’t yet seem to be a Mac app that is comparable in feature set.   Until a GPSr with a mobile network connection becomes available, then this is really unavoidable.  To generate PocketQueries, you need to be a premium member of Geocaching.com, which costs $3 (about £1.60) a month (I think!).  

The second part is a bit more difficult.  There are two ways to do this – Online or Offline.  The online method requires you accessing the Geocaching.com website whilst you are on the go, which obviously requires some sort of mobile device.  You can access the full geocaching.com website via the iPhone, or wap.geocaching.com (a cut-down text-only version) on less-capable phones.  There are also other options for viewing info online – e.g. http://m.cmiyc.com/  (an online Pocket Query Viewer – developed more for pre App-store iPhones) and This is fine where you have a connection to the mobile network, but the nature of Geocaching is that it often takes you to places that you don’t get a signal (happened to me yesterday!).  The net result of this is that you are basically cut off in many places.  

The offline method needs a bit more thought.  With this you need to be able to view the info without any sort of network connection being required – i.e. from the storage space of your device.  I’ve tried several methods of doing this :-

• Via PDF files – exported from Geocaching.com and put on the iPhone to be viewed with one of the file viewers available (I use AirSharing – it’s free and works very well).  This means exporting the PDFs oneby-one and transferring them over – hardly the best way when on the go.
   
• Via HTML exports from GSAK – GSAK can produce HTML exports of its database of geocaches.  In other words, you can produce a nice, indexed list of geocaches that matches those you send to your GPSr.  Use a file utility (again I use AirSharing) to transfer and view these HTML files.  This works fairly well.  However – I’ve found a problem that makes the actual cache info pages jump to a point halfway down each, which I haven’t yet been able o sort out.  Also, I find that Airsharing tends to be a bit slow when viewing these files.  However, if I can sort out the jumping issue, then this is a definite possibility.  These can also be viewed by transferring to a PocketPC (Windows Mobile) PDA too.  
   
• By using my iPod and exporting the info in the GPX files to text via MacCaching.  This is quite good, but involves me having to use another, separate app to GSAK – again complicating things.  Also, this is a text-only method.  Sometimes this can be restrictive, as there may be images that are required for finding the cache, or the reformatting that happens can make the entry hard to read.  

So – a minefield of options thusfar (and I probably haven’t covered half of them here!). 

A new contender to the offline throne on iPhone has recently surfaced.  iGeocacher (http://www.ayefon.com/geo/index.cfm) is a native app for the iPhone which takes GPX files (which you initially have to upload to web space, or use the author’s own server), and stores them locally in a SQL-type database.  This is then accessible offline.  Hurrah!  The damage?  £8.99 in the UK (not sure how much in the US – could anyone confirm?).

So – how well does it work?

iGeocacher Screenshot

Well… the answer is – pretty well!  This is the first Geocaching app that has been designed around the idea of offline viewing of the cache info.  This means that once you’ve been through the rigmarole of getting your caches onto the iPhone (which you do via any network-accessible URL, or by registering for free at the app’s homepage – all the instructions can be found there too), the interface is surprisingly nice.  You can search, group, and sort your caches.  You can utilize the 3Gs in-built GPS to show the caches in order of distance from your current location.  You can also plot the caches onto a map directly on the iphone using the google maps app (which does require a network connection to download the maps as usual).

Cache Info Page

 When you click the relevant geocache, the info appears in a nicely formatted way, showing the location coordinates, the cache info entry, and the last few log entries (depending on how many you chose to include during your Pocket Query generation on geocaching.com).  The entry even shows any included HTML elements (i.e. usually pictures) if you have a network connection.  Even if you don’t, these are usually not required, just useful.  

The hint is hidden, and can be revealed by pressing the hint button.  A nice little touch is being able to click the ‘Log’ button at the top of the page, which (again, network connection permitting), sends you to the log page for that cache on Geocaching.com, where you can log your find quickly without having to go through the whole search thing on the site.  This may seem like a small point, but it’s the searching and navigation to the relevant caches that takes the time through a mobile interface like the iphone.  

So – first impressions?  Well… I’m yet to use it in the field, but I have a feeling this little app is going to be extremely useful in the future.  I’ve been looking for an easy way to keep a database of cache info to hand, and I think this has just about done it.  Shame Apple have decided to hide the file system of the iPhone from us (officially anyway), so you have to go through the URL method to load the GPX info into the app, but once this is done, the rest is easy.  

If you’re still unsure, take a look at the site (again, it’s at http://www.ayefon.com/geo/index.cfm) – there are a pile of videos to watch.  The usefulness of this app makes it well worth your £8.99, and I can guarantee that you will find this an asset when out and about.  It ain’t perfect by any means.  The ability to see if there are trackables in the cache would be an asset, along with the ability to go straight to the log page for the trackable in question.  Also, a simple ‘Found’ button, which automatically moved the cache into another group would also be great.  Lastly, a way of automatically showing which caches you have already found when you upload them to begin with.  I’ll probably think of other things as I go along, but to be honest, this is a very good app already.  Looking forward to updates!

Cheers!