If you have young kids and you’ve never heard of Geocaching , this is a family friendly activity you should check out. To participate, you’ll use a web site to locate GPS coordinates that lead you to hidden packages (called geocaches) in your local area. These are placed all over the world by volunteers participating in the sport. Take these coordinates with you - and your GPS - and off you go into the woods to find treasures. Kids love this and because GPS coordinates in the woods are a bit unreliable, finding the treasures is a lot harder than you’d think. Until now.

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Geocaching is a recreational sport that my kids and I love to do. It involves finding hidden treasure in the woods based upon the use of GPS coordinates. The main web site that compiles a master list of all these treasures is geocaching.com which is run by Groundspeak.

They’ve just announced that they have submitted their official iPhone app to the App Store and expect it to be available within two weeks. While there are several other geocaching applications for iPhone, none has the functionality that is expected from the “official” Groundspeak App:

The first release will not have the feature to log caches or filter hides and finds, but it will be included as a free upgrade as we add that functionality

Some non-obvious features:

* You can look up travel bugs and find out their goal while out on the trail
* Saved Items allows you to save a cache listing and navigate to it, even when you are out of network range
* The application starts in beginner mode which only shows traditional caches. Advanced shows all types
* To help with speed issues on, say, the Edge network, you can restrict the number of results to 5, 10, 15 or 20

P.S. - If you think you have trouble getting a 3G signal in your house — try getting both a 3G AND GPS signal in the middle of woods located in the middle of nowhere.

Groundspeak via: TUAW

About two years ago I discovered Geocaching. This fun activity revolves around people who hide caches of small items in out-of-the-way locations. Typically these caches will be small watertight compartments with a dozen different tiny trinkets and a log book for finders to sign. A popular web site, geocaching.com, serves as the central point for registering and discovering different caches. The Geopher Lite application for iphone integrates with geochaching.com so that you can instantly search your current location to find any nearby caches. Make no mistake that you are probably NOT going very deep into a heavily wooded area with your iPhone GPS because the signal won’t penetrate the dense woods. But for adhoc geocaching when you want a quick look a what cache’s may be hidden nearby - this could be worth far more than the $1.99 that the App Store charges.

Geopher lite