3.7.6, a minor update to GeoToad should be released later today due to a small change in the Geocaching website that broke 3.7.5. If you would like to test this new 1-line patch for us, download details.rb and replace the copy that exists in the geocache folder within GeoToad. Thanks again for all of your bug reports!

3.7.5 was released this morning. Most importantly, it should no longer crash under Windows this time, as it's been recompiled with ruby-mswin32 1.8 and exerb-3.0. Also, it's been modified to be friendlier to the GC.com website, with longer delays between fetches. While it does slow down execution time a bit, it's better to have good net etiquette.

There have been reports of the Windows version of 3.7.3 crashing, so I've gone ahead and recompiled it with ruby 1.8.2 and uploaded it again. If you are having probles, try and re-download it.

No one complained about the 3.7.3-RC1, so I've retagged it as 3.7.3. It's made some changes to be more compatible and likeable by the geocaching.com website. Here are the changes since 3.7.1:

• Fix for the new geocaching search page layout.
• CGI.unescapeHTML the geocache name to prevent " names from showing up. This may break international characters, but hopefully not.
• Disable shadowfetch, by request of GC.com
• Add delorme-nourl format, by Russell Teague <russell%mtnbike.org>
• Fix for decrypted hint formats. When they have no hint, they will show the hint of the last entry. Bug reported by Will Kraml <wkraml%a1.net>
• Underscores no longer appear in SmartNames

Sorry about the delay in getting the new release out. The hard disk in my laptop found an untimely time to die.

Want to keep up with the latest GeoToad releases, get support, or help contribute to GeoToad? Join one of our fine mailing lists. There are three to choose from: geotoad-announce (new release notices), geotoad-devel (for developers, bug reports, etc.), and geotoad-users (general discussion).

Geocaching.com changed their website layout last week and broke the GeoToad application slightly. No patches have been submitted yet to fix it, but expect to see a bugfix release of GeoToad by the end of the week, along with new mailing lists and support forums.

We've got four big news items! First, we've moved GeoToad to sf.net. This was supposed to happen a few weeks ago, but I guess I was inspired today. The second cool thing is lowracer wrote a very cool Introduction to Geotoad article.

The third item is of concern. Bryan Roth (cofounder of Geocaching.com) has asked me to terminate the distribution of GeoToad. I am currently reviewing my options regarding this. I will do whatever it takes to reach an agreement with the GC team to keep this project going, which hopefully will just mean modifying GeoToad to check and make sure the user has a valid subscription to their site.

The fourth item is that I am about to leave on vacation to Europe. I'll be out of reach until August 23rd. Don't expect GeoToad 3.8 till September.

You can now browse the current source code repository through the web interface. Checkout ViewCVS from the source page. Ugly, yet effective.

This minor release fixes a nasty crash bug with invalid international characters, and offers some template changes:

• Instead of crashing when encountering invalid UTF-8 characters, we replace them with a question mark. Thanks to Stephen Hutchinson <SEHutchinson%fhsc.com> for helping narrow down the problem
• New delorme output format, by Russell Teague <russell%mtnbike.org>. It even comes with a nice Geocaching icon set you can find in contrib/
• gpspoint format compatibility fix from Dan Boger <dan%peeron.com>, makes it compatible with Viking
• Include table of contents for html-decrypt. Bug reported by Russell Teague <russell%mtnbike.org>

Thanks to the beta testers for their comments! Expect to see 3.8 in August!

The theme for this release is interoperability. We did everything we could to make sure GeoToad would play well with every other peice of GPS software out there, and I think you'll love what we've done.

• Major revamp of international character handling. In 3.6 I stopped stripping international characters, but it broke GPX and Cachemate exports because the characters were not XML safe. I now try to convert them to XML entities before outputting to GPX or HTML. Thanks to Ryan Sexsmith (rsexsmit%telus.net) for the test case that narrowed down the problem.
• Add two new export formats: HTML-decrypt and text-decrypt. It's the same as the HTML and text formats, but with the hints decrypted for you. Jerry Davis (jfdecd%wi.rr.com)
• EasyName waypoint id's are now off by default to be more compatible with the rest of the world. Set an EasyName length if you would like them back.
• MapTech Exchange, gpsdrive, tiger, and OziExplorer formats no longer require gpsbabel.
• holux format should now work properly (typo)
• Improved GPX output
• New format selector in the TUI
• Improvements with shadowfetch handling

Thanks to the beta testers for their comments! Expect to see 3.8 in August!

sara%vulturenet.de reported a bug with the text-user interface where it would not let you use any other query type than zipcode. I'm not sure how this got past the beta, but It's now fixed in 3.6.1. Sorry for the embarassing bug!

GeoToad 3.6.0 has been released. Here are some of the changes:

• GPX files now include the last 5 comments
• HTML and Text files now include a better decode ring and what the type of the last comment was
• Enable download retries. We will now retry once for every URL fetch failure, until there are 4 failures altogether.
• Use (s)tart instead of (q)uit to go from the menu screen to the querying. A bit less unixy, and a bit more friendly.
• Add -E for disabling easyname waypoint ID's, which really just sets the waypoint length to 0. This should answer the most popular "How do I?" e-mails.
• Be more liberal with inputted coordinate formats. You can now directly paste them in from the geocaching site again like you used to.
• friendlier error messages
• More bugfixes than you can shake a stick at.

GeoToad 3.6 is currently in beta testing, and fixes numerous bugs, plus a few minor enhancements. Beta 3 is available now in the files area. If you have problems with GeoToad not reporting all of the waypoints in your area, you definitely want this beta.

Expect to see 3.6.0 final out by Friday.

Many users reported crash issues with GeoToad 3.5.0 under Windows. The problem ended up being that the locally cached filenames were too long for Windows to handle (>255 characters). 3.5.2 fixes this issue, as well as some mixed path issues for Windows users.

Our first major release in 4 months is out! Download it now! Here are some of the new changes:

• New Text-User Interface (TUI), which is the default instead of the command-line interface.
• Windows users no longer have to install Ruby. We now compile GeoToad as an .exe just for them!
• Greatly improved HTML, GPX, Text, and CSV output
• Ability to do title keyword searches in addition to the body
• Much faster downloading of geocache information.
• Default waypoint size set to 16
• Slowlink mode added for extra performance for dialup users
• Duplicate waypoint id correction
• Zipcode support for Canada and England
• A boatload of bugfixes, reported by our fantastic userbase. Thanks guys!

I would like to personally thank Mike Capito and Scott Brynen who put a lot of work into this release. See the ChangeLog for a detailed list of changes.

3.5.0 beta 2 (was 3.2.0) is now in the files area. It's recommended for everyone, though we still need to add the interactive text mode before the next beta and final. Be a good tester, report bugs! See the ChangeLog for details.

I've begun placing 3.2.0 alpha builds online. Only recommended for developers, see the ChangeLog for details.

Talk about the move that took too long. I moved to Bloomington, Indiana last month, wrestled for 4 weeks trying to get an internet connection at home, and then my main web provider became very unreliable all of a sudden. I've now moved the website to my new place of work, and though I've still got DNS issues, enough of the infrastructure is back that I could finally put out a maintenance release for this little bugger.

My sincere apologies to everyone who's e-mailed me bug reports and patches (thanks again, Mike!).

3.0.6 fixes the geocaching.com page layout change so that it doesn't crash anymore, and gives a better description for the CacheMate export type. We've got some patches lying around here that need to be massaged into the code a little better, but things are rolling again.

Who knows, you might get a Thanksgiving gift!

Geocaching.com changed the way their subscriber only caches look like to unauthenticated clients, which caused this error to pop up for GeoToad users:

./geocache/output.rb:238:in 'FilterInternal': undefined method 'length' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)

I also found a strange bug in ruby's 1.6.8 cgi.rb library that I've issued a workaround for, though I doubt anyone will run into it. 3.0.5 has been issued with a fix to work around this site change. As a bonus, it will no longer waste your time trying to download subscriber only caches. Enjoy!

A couple of minor bugfixes and changes here. 3.0.3 was never released because 3.0.4 came out so soon afterwards.

• Version checking. GeoToad will let you know when it's been obsoleted
• Default distance changed to 10 miles.
• Fixed the tempfile location for Windows users
• Check for invalid zipcode requests

Some major bugfixes for users of Windows or Ruby 1.8, minor bugfixes otherwise. This will most likely be the last release for a little while, as we get our things together for a web interface.

• Better HTML parsing for the cache title and author
• Coordinate searches now work in Windows (filename issue)
• Ruby 1.8.0 users get better compatibility with shadowfetch
• Coordinate checks now get screened for valid syntax
• Exec filters (gpsbabel or cmconvert) now work if the destination filename has a space in it
• Better text template
• Now distributed as a zip file instead of a tgz, to avoid problems with Windows users

A few minor fixes/changes got shoved into the tree today in the form of 3.0.1:

• CacheMate support in the form of cmconvert
• High-ASCII HTML entities removed for more compliant GPX output
• Ruby 1.8 fix for searches by state

We are pleased to announce the release of GeoToad 3.0.0, which is what we decided to morph 2.7 into after changing the default output format to GPX. Here's a list of notable changes:

• New default output format - GPX. This is understood by more software than the old EasyGPS LOC format, and contains more information.
• No more nasty hacks encoding HTML characters, meaning consistant HTML output.
• Coordinate searches - You can now search by GPS coordinates, which is a good work around for people who can't use the international search (still broken).
• Combined argument searches - You can now search for 27513:33434, and it will combine the results from the two zipcodes! Works for all search types! (Thanks Mike Capito!)
• Better automatic file naming - If you don't specify an output filename, we'll make one up for you that includes the search type, search arguments, and distance.
• Tab Output format - for GPS Connect
• Standard bunch of bugfixes related to the geocaching.com website changing designs

BTW, the release party is 107 Brampton Lane, Apt 2D, Cary, NC, 27513 tonight! You can help me pack up for Indiana.

Mike Capito has been throwing patches over the wall to me for geotoad. He's gone ahead and synced up the changes with the new commenter format, making it so that user inclusion/exclusion works again. He's also gone ahead and completed the coordinat searching support for me, and has sent me patches adding the ability to combine multiple queries. I've implemented all but the last one so far.

I've been busy myself with the stubs for international search support (may be broken for some time), native GPX and tabbed output (GPS Connect) formats. Look for the alpha builds in the normal download location.

Jonat Brander gave me another bug report today: Searching for geocaches in other countries does not work. It seems geocaching.com is in the process of making regional searches work inside countries outside of North America. Of course, they've implemented this in a way to give page scrapers like GeoToad a hard time. Instead of getting a list of geocaches when I make a request for a country code, I get a page in which I need to parse out the encrypted ENVTARGET post variable and resubmit the page with it. Not too hard, I should have it done by the end of this week, since I will be leaving for Sweden on Friday.

Jonat Brander reported a bug with the shadowfetch routines in GeoToad 2.6.1. It ends up that the Net::HTTP data semantics changed in ruby 1.8.0, so it would break when trying to update the shadow hosts. I released 2.6.2, tested with ruby 1.8.0 under Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.2.6 today. Thanks to Jonat for the excellent bug report. If you spot any issues or have any suggestions, please contact us!.

In other news, I'm working on the 2.7 series, which will feature native GPX and tabbed-text output, as well as better HTML generation. I hope to freeze the API's at this stage so that I can begin work on the web interface.

We've begun migrating this website to CSS so it's more easily maintainable. It's still not pretty, but it's easier for us to work with.

We've also pushed 2.6.1 (2.6.0 was never announced) out the door, with some goodies to boot. We've nearly exhausted our TODO list now, so don't expect anything but maintenance releases in the near term, unless any other developers step up to bat. We really would like to pursue better user interfaces (Web, Windows, MacOS) for future releases.

• We now output the hint, direction and distance for each cache in HTML/Text summaries
• Filtering by the last time the geocache was found
• Filtering by the placement time of the geocache
• Filtering by the name of the geocache owner
• More improvements to the HTML processing and minor bug fixes
• Slow-mode. If your query may need more than 350 caches to download, reduce the load on geocaching.com by slowing down the queries

Looks like we had some bugs in the last version that snuck by our elite QA department.

• Better HTML output. Less spacing, and bullet normalization.
• Sync to some website layout changes between 2.5.0b1 and 2.5.0 final. This fixes the virgin false-alarm and unknown cache type bugs
• Fixed regular expression substitution so that ruby 1.8.0 doesn't complain

This release brings compatibility with the new geocaching.com site design. It's a required upgrade, so come and get it. Here goes:

• Compatibility with the new geocaching.com redesign
• Added -l, which is the length of your waypoint ID's. It defaults to 8 to make everyone happy, but I think newer Garmin owners can set it to 16 without a problem.
• Changed -u to -U (user exclusion)
• Added -u (user inclusion)
• Web fetching now supports redirects (301)

GeoToad is currently broken after the recent Geocaching redesign. We're hard at work at the new 2.5 that fixes it. There is currently a beta available, but it breaks after 200 waypoints. Sorry! Help always appreciated.

2.3.3 now generates validatable HTML 4.0 Transitional output. I did this to see if I could fix an crash with the built-in browser (not Opera) on the Sony-Ericsson P800, but it didn't fix it anyways. The pages look a little nicer though! I also fixed some other bugs too, of course.

• HTML 4.0 Transitional Output, even validator.w3.org likes us
• Geocaches with no short description (OBX) no longer crash geotoad
• Better looking HTML output

I announced 2.3.1, but here is 2.3.2 already! It's mostly minor appearance and performance tweaks, but worth getting:

• virgin caches are now specially marked in the HTML indexes
• Improvements to the help/usage dialog, it now takes up much less room (for 80x25 users)
• Cache tweaks: expiry for caches is now 4 days shadow, 5 days local.Cache expiry for searches is now 12 hours local, 15 hours shadow
• zipcode searches now default to 15 miles
• Delay less for uncached searches
• Fail gracefully if the user specifies an unknown option

Our first public release of GeoToad is finally out the door. A couple of important changes have been made recently:

• Drastically better documentation. (still not good enough)
• Updated the list of formats we support through gpsbabel (not all tested)
• We now will lookup the country/state codes for you.
• We now export to a file named geotoad_output.(format extension) instead of stdout if you give it no arguments.

Please submit any bug reports, confusion, or suggestions to geotoad+web@toadstool.sh

We've now actually got a website up, Huzzah! Yes, it's a pretty lame little site, I'm not feeling overly creative at the moment. Maybe someone with more inspiration and time can step up to bat and make a better site design. I feel kind of bad having this site done with normal HTML markup, rather than some nice CSS magic. I just have been working on the code too much :)