c:geo to stop further development

[caughtatwork]

http://post.carnero.cc/cgeo

Almost two years ago I bought Android-powered phone. Android Market then was like small child. Cute, but unable to do anything. Neither geocaching. I missed Windows Mobile's GCzII. So I decided to write my own application to let myself go geocaching until someone write better application. GroundSpeak was promising official one. And they keep promising for more than one year.

English part will continue below. Cesky ctenar snad odpusti radoby-anglicky kus textu. Stale neni v mych silach napsat anglicky clanek tak, aby byl skutecne anglicky. Jelikoz uzivatele c:geo jsou z 95% cizinci, spise prectou neco jako anglictinu nez cestinu.

During c:geo developement I had to keep my eyes on GroundSpeak. They didn't like c:geo. I read their TOS manytimes, I saw some chapters that can kill c:geo. But the only thing I get from GroundSpeak was "don't use our icons". Until two months ago they never said c:geo is illegal from their point of view. They just tried to scary every user of c:geo, but never said directly to me something like "don't do it". I really don't like their attitude - they want anything that can breathe to pay for their low-quality services and applications. Remember all those outages because of upgrade of some invisible text on web? And it will be even worse since they decided to not allow almost anything to not paying users. They are still unable to bring some interesting improvement. It was good (standard) attitude in 1990, but today it's really outdated. Remember Facebook, Twitter, Google services, Flickr and any other service currently popular? Mostly they bring reasonable things to users for free and some of them adds many cool features on top after paying few bucks each year. They also have pretty good API since beginning. GroundSpeak is spreading FUD for free and giving you unstable ugly looking service for 30 bucks per year and you're requested for more money in order to get their almost four-star application. They still doesn't have public API. And some rumors I heard said that they will make public "version 1" but they own applications will use "version 2". That means GroundSpeak is probably trying to keep all other apps behind. Since they aren't able to make good application, they have to restrict all others. All those things doesn't sound reasonable to me. In short: I'm pissed off by GroundSpeaks' attitude. And small addition: With new work I doesn't have as much free time as before, so fighting against GroundSpeak is not so fun.

I decided to leave geocaching (the game) behind and find another fun for me. I won't support such company anymore. And that also means end of active developement of c:geo. It will stay on Market until it stop working due to changes on geocaching.com. Sources will be available on github as they are right now.

Big thank to all users of c:geo, for all sympathy given and expressed by 20,000 ratings (average 4.7 of 5). Thank you for support, donations, kind words and so on. I hope c:geo did good job and brings you to many caches. Hope you had fun with it. And now, please excuse me... I'm taking my camera and going to nature without intent to find cache

[CraigRat]

Hopefully someone will fork it and continue it on... it's brought FAR more Android cachers to the game than the GC app has.

[mtrax]

yep spotted that, very unfortunate lets hope the source code gets picked up , as its a fantastic android APP, far better than the official one.
I will copy down the source just incase...
But from what I see other people do contribute occasionally so its possible one or more of them may continue.

[davroy]

I'm so sad about this news, i absolutely love c:geo. I do hope someone takes up the fight.

[Zalgariath]

Chatter on the Irish forum have been sighting sources that the bloke has actually just gotten bored and has used this all as a convenient excuse to cut and run. But at least he is releasing the code so some other developer may pick it up

[Laighside Legends]

That's so sad I really do hope someone picks up code and works with it...
It does seam a bit odd that this happens just after groundspeak released their api to him/her - Maybe he/she just got feed up with them?
What will really be annoying now is goundspeak will make some small change to the website just to stuff up the current c:geo

I wonder why they are so protective of there icons?

[CraigRat]

I wonder why they are so protective of there icons?

It's the only part of the data THEY have created and own

[CraigRat]

It does seam a bit odd that this happens just after groundspeak released their api to him/her - Maybe he/she just got feed up with them?

Carnero has mentioned that he is moving on to other pursuits anyhow.

I think most of the uproar has come from other people rather than himself.

[PirateRock]

What a shame... it's the app that made me buy a Android handset in the first place. If Groundspeak could implement just some of the great features it would be nice.

Bit of a shame, it's an app worth paying for.

[mtrax]

I saw some chatter on the Facebook wall about other developers picking up the code

[caughtatwork]

Well, the code is all there, open sourced, ready for someone else.
The killer is whetheror not the API from GS is suitable for the application.
If, as indicated, the initial API is available to applications where the user is a premium member, this may limit the ultimate userbase of the solution.
If I could code in Java, I'd have a go, but I can't be bothered learning.

[mtrax]

I wonder if GS has paid him to stop programming? ... just a thought.
any way not sure if this is true but he tweeted me to say he wasn't impressed with the beta version of the API, so I read that it wasn't really useful.

[CraigRat]

Theres quite a few apps that do the same as what c:geo did (Including Geobeagle/Geohunter if you also install 'Find Geocaches' to ...ummm... download caches..... it's probably not quite as nice a solution, but it works.

People do treat c:geo like it's the be-all and end-all of caching apps, and I would disagree, there's plenty of good stuff out there.

[CraigRat]

Good News Everyone!:

As expected, c:geo has been forked and is now on the market as c:geo Opensource

[Zalgariath]

Well I might give it a go. Already found one or two things quite useful geobeagle cant do like project co-ords. Over here I have near unlimited data. If it can store the 100,000 waypoints for offline use like Beagle can I may swap over. Still, Beagle does GCA and Open caches too