Knaģa emuāri

A new version of OfflineCacher has been published. The instructions are still the same and are available from previous post. The same post has more information on what OfflineCacher can do. In short – it is an Windows Mobile Smartphone application to enable geocaching from your mobile phone without ever using the GPRS (data) connection – this is really useful when traveling as roaming charges most of the time are through the roof.

Download:

• Desktop application 504Kb (map downloader, no installation required);
• Mobile application setup 350Kb (run the .cab file from the mobile phone).

Changes in this version:

• The cache storage is changed from a simple XML file to a SQLite database. This means that the application can work with lot more caches without eating all of the memory and startup time will always be constant – previously it could take even 20 seconds to load with 200 caches.
• Download process is now made paralel and in total runs up to 4 times faster. It is also now possible to cancel the whole download or only part of it (for example, if you do not need the satelite maps).
• The cache description is loaded correctly – previously only the long description (second part) was loaded and short description was ignored. This caused incomplete cache instructions to be displayed on the device.
• Changed to download also the cache images not only images from logs. But still only the last 20 images are downloaded.
• Turning off and on the GPS works correctly without restarting the application. Previously turning off worked fine but after turning it back on the application had to be restarted.

The work continues to enable the application to load and store more than 2000 caches at the same time with as much maps as possible. The first step has been done – it is now possible to store many caches at the same time, the next version will contain changes to how maps are stored to use the limited capacity of storage cards as effectively as possible.

It could be possible that some cache filtering options do not work correctly but my weekend caching session did not turn up any major issues.

The change from XML to SQLite also means that whatever caches you had loaded previously will be lost and you will have to load them again. As all .gpx files are not deleted but copied to the Processed directory, you can just move tham back up and the application will load them.