ear-fung.us I’m a programmer. I’m also pro-grammar.

Geocaching App v4 – A Load of Crap

I understand wanting to release a product for your audience to enjoy, but don't release an application that users pay $10 for on the iTunes App Store (relatively expensive) full of incomplete features. Users have been experiencing crashes, they lose all their saved data in the application from version 3.x and some of the features do NOT work as advertised.

You can read the list of issues in the Groundspeak forums, so I won't go through the complete list of issues. One feature that I was really wanting was integration with Google Maps on the iPhone, which you'd think would be relatively simple since the iPhone has built-in support for Google Maps. Any application worth its salt uses the Google Maps API on the iPhone since it's so readily available to developers. Well... the implementation of Google Maps is finally here! But it doesn't work.

Let me show you an example as I zoom into GC2A748:

Oh... it's in that field!

No, it's on the tree line to the north of that field!

Oh, ok... it's at the back of that store.

Never mind, it's at the front of the store.

OK, we're getting somewhere - it's in the parking lot, about the 5th spot from the front of the store.

Nope, it's at the half-way point in the parking lot, to the left of the grass.

OK, this is getting ridiculous. Is this one of those moving geocaches?

Finally - full zoom. I sure hope it's there.

Now at this point, many people might say, "Just shut up and use the OpenStreetMap or Bing! Maps that have always worked on the app!" My point is that they should have never released the Google Maps feature in this version of the application since it doesn't work - I mean, your position marker doesn't even update when you move while using Google Maps in the app!

Don't get me wrong, I like the guys at Groundspeak, despite the fact that all their data is completely closed and their development platform for their site is not my cup-of-tea. They were innovators of the Geocaching hobby, but releasing this half-baked sorry excuse for an application update was a bonehead move. It seems to me that the application was not beta tested very well, if at all.

I would downgrade to the previous version except for the fact that version 3.x has a key feature missing on the iPhone4: map orientation using the compass. The old version that had the feature for the 3GS looks as if it is checking the device identifier string to determine if the compass feature is present (and only enabling the feature on 3GS devices) instead of checking whether or not the the device has compass capabilities - so on the iPhone4, the compass rotation doesn't work at all, when it should since the hardware capability is there.

Don't get me started about the buttons in the interface being images - pixelated on my display...