(link to podcast)
0:00:14.4 Chris Ronan: Hello everybody and welcome to inside Geocaching HQ. This is the podcast about things that are happening at Geocaching HQ in Seattle. My name is Chris Ronan. My geocaching username is Rock Chalk and we are in HQ at this very moment. Sometimes I’m in my house when I do this thing, but I’m at HQ because I get the chance to have a real life in person conversation with Nicole from the mobile team who I meant to look this up before we started. How many times you’ve been on the podcast, Nicole, because you’re part of like the three or four timers club. I’m not sure. Have you ever watched on Saturday Night Live? They have this running joke with hosts that have hosted X number of times. I feel like we should have that for the podcast. I think Brian would probably be the leader, but I think you’re right up in there. ‘Cause you’ve been on a number of times in your various roles at the company. So, we’re gonna be talking about the Geocaching app because you’re on the mobile team. But let’s get started first by telling people who you are, what you do at HQ and what you’ve done. ‘Cause you’ve been here for several years now at HQ.
0:01:23.2 Nicole Jendro: Yeah, it’s good to be back. Thank you for having me again. My name is Nicole. My username is Nykkole written N-Y-K-K-O-L-E. I’ve been at HQ for eight years now. And I started out on the team with you, Chris.
0:01:39.6 CR: That’s right.
0:01:40.9 NJ: Do you remember back in the day?
0:01:44.1 CR: And you escaped.
0:01:44.2 NJ: So I was doing review support, volunteer support and then I moved into a product role. And so I was a product manager on the website. And now for the last, oh gosh, three-ish, four-ish years, maybe I’ve been…
0:02:02.6 CR: Time’s just a mess now, isn’t it? [laughter]
0:02:02.7 NJ: I’ve been the product manager on the mobile app.
0:02:07.1 CR: Yeah. And so you’ve had this great amount of experience throughout the company over the years and now with the mobile team for a few years. And so, today we’re gonna talk about, I guess what we’re calling not so hidden features within the Geocaching app. And I think this conversation, the idea for it maybe even dates back to when we were in Colorado geocaching together earlier this year and we were walking along and you were showing me different stuff. And I think for some people… Somebody like me who thinks of themselves as a really experienced geocacher, and I think you can’t teach me anything. I know all there is to know, but somebody like me, I get into my routine. At least I know how I think to do everything with the app or with the GPS or whatever I’m using to go find caches.
0:02:55.9 CR: And I’m in a routine and I don’t really deviate from that routine very much. And then somebody like you says, “Hey, did you know about this?” And I’m like well, “No, not really, because that’s on a screen that I don’t think to tap on.” And so that’s what this conversation is about is kind of talking about some of those things that maybe you do know about them, but maybe you’re like me and you just look up one day and you’re like “Oh wait,” HQ’s mobile team has added a bunch of stuff since I started using this app and I’ve missed some of the stuff that’s… There wasn’t a huge announcement about it or maybe there was and I missed it. So that’s kinda what this is about and there is a lot of cool stuff. And I think the thing we were gonna start with was how to find cool caches or some of the tools that might lead you to finding some of the more interesting caches that are out there by using the Geocaching app.
0:03:47.4 NJ: Yeah. One of my favorite things that we released early this year is the indicator of highly favorite caches on the map. It’s that pink heart. And so as the map loads, you get about 300 caches and the top 10% will be highlighted. And so what I really like about this feature is that as you travel instead of using the filter to say, I want any caches that have more than 50 favorite points, well if you are in… I don’t know, rural Wisconsin, you might only get two caches. I don’t know that for a fact. No offense to rural Wisconsin.
0:04:21.9 CR: Yeah, That was a very specific example. Just throwing out rural Wisconsin. But there’s some great caches. I was there for the West Bend Mega earlier this year, which you’ve been to as well in the past.
0:04:32.9 NJ: I have. And that’s why I used this feature. And so I know for a fact that there’s a lot of cool caches in Wisconsin because we used highly favorite caches on the map to identify them.
0:04:42.2 CR: And I really love that feature too. And there’s been a lot of discussion I’ve seen among the community about, “oh, well they should use percentage of favorite points or as opposed to,” well, we’ve got the reasons. It would be a huge low difference. I’m sure to do percentage, but just total favorite points. Is such a big improvement over not having anything like it was before.
0:05:00.8 NJ: Yeah, we did actually look at what it would look like with percentage just, and between the two algorithm, there was only about a 10% difference. So, and there is like having the percentage, it has its own issues, right? No algorithm is perfect. And so if a new cache gets published and the first person gives it a favorite point, now it’s at 100%. But if you find a cache that I hide, I hope you give it a favorite point. That would be very skewed.
0:05:24.7 CR: So yeah, the high favorite point indicator is… I’ve really loved it as I’ve been traveling and it’s all, I don’t know, it’s kind of almost gotten a little exciting when I see the heart pop up and it makes me think, oh, that’s something I need to check out. So that’s a good one.
0:05:40.6 NJ: And I’ve actually used it with the filter of minimum favorite points. So, as every region is different, I’ll look at what is this area’s highly favorite caches. And so if it’s, let’s say it’s around 50 for that area, then I will put in 50 and then I will get a wider radius and know every cache on my map that’s highly favorite for that region. But I’ll still get the top 10% of those high favorited caches.
0:06:08.0 CR: Right. I never see right away we’re only what, three minutes into this thing. And I’ve already learned something that I hadn’t thought about. Well, that’s a great way to use it. I hadn’t done that before myself. So next time though, I’m gonna filters.
0:06:22.7 NJ: Yeah, I love using the filters depending on what kind of outing I’m planning. For example, when I go out caching with kids, I like to filter for regular and large, large-sized caches. And then I’ll make sure to bring some little toys that the kids can either leave and have a lesson in letting something go for other people or a trait of theirs, I’ll swag in the cache, attributes filtering for attributes. I do that a lot as well. I really like field puzzles and night caches, although for night caches, I must say it can be confusing to filter it because there’s multiple attributes that could indicate a night cache, like UV light required or flashlight required and if the… So yeah, so I’ll do multiple searches basically if I wanna do a night cache outing, I’ll filter for a night cache recommended at night, flashlight required UV light required, and I put them all on a list and then I have my night cache list.
0:07:19.6 CR: Mystery caches. And a couple of interesting things there that people may or may not know about.
0:07:23.2 NJ: Yeah. For mystery caches and multi-caches as well, I have a little bit of my own routine. So I don’t know there might be better ways to do it, but I use the personal note. So from the cache details page, you can tap the three dots in the top right to open the personal note. So I will copy anything relevant from the description that I need to answer a puzzle out into the personal note. And that’s where then we’ll have the final coordinates or the next stage. And then I copy those coordinates and then I go to waypoints and I paste the coordinates in as a name so that I can easily fill them into the fields for the waypoint.
0:08:00.0 CR: Yeah, that was a game changer when we added to where the personal note syncs with the website. That was something that for the longest time, way back in the day of the old app, when you could do a personal note but it didn’t sync. Oh that was the worst. And so when we added that, and that’s been a few years now. But that was really great.
0:08:23.3 NJ: So for Corrected coordinates, specifically for mystery caches, when you go to the waypoint screen and go into the posted coordinates, you can edit. Tap the edit icon and change them to the corrected coordinates and it’ll actually be the corrected coordinates icon and sync with the web and everything. And so then that icon is on the map where the final is and you… Instead of having an additional way point and remembering which of the caches you’ve already solved.
0:08:51.5 CR: Right. And kinda putting you on the spot here, but I’ll put one of my Christmas wishes to, I’d love to be able to change it for some of the other cache types.
0:09:02.1 NJ: I agree.
0:09:03.1 CR: Where I go letterbox, stuff like that.
0:09:04.6 NJ: Like any cache type that has a final coordinate should have that. And it is on my wishlist as well. I have a 200 plus item wishlist from…
0:09:13.8 CR: Oh, you’re a…
0:09:13.9 NJ: Me and players and lackeys that have come to me. It is very, very hard to prioritize and very painful.
0:09:20.6 CR: Over 200.
0:09:21.6 NJ: Yeah, I can send you a link to it, [laughter]
0:09:24.9 CR: Yeah. Well that’s just gonna make me sad. [laughter] I’ll be like ” Oh, I wanted that too.” So yeah, someday, hopefully we’ll get those on there.
0:09:33.6 NJ: Working through them.
0:09:35.8 CR: Yeah. So yeah, some stuff there on mystery caches then friends, that’s something that I feel like has been a higher priority in recent years to try to find ways that people can connect with other geocachers via the app.
0:09:50.2 NJ: Yeah. So we released the option to add friends via the app last year, so that’s also fairly new. We always had friends… For a long time had friends on the website. And now from the profile in the app, you can tap that icon of the two little people in the top to add.
0:10:06.6 CR: As we both go to our app.
0:10:09.6 NJ: As we go down to open the friend screen. And so that will give you a list of all your friends and then you will also see any friend requests if you have any. And then on your profile you can expand the header to get to your QR code. And so when you meet someone at an event, they can scan the QR code which allows them to add you as a friend.
0:10:36.1 CR: Yeah. That’s one that Cindy, who we both work with mentioned to me the other day when we were talking and I knew about it at one point. I think I… Did it debut right around the 20th anniversary celebration?
0:10:51.3 NJ: That’s correct, yes.
0:10:51.4 CR: Here in Seattle. Yeah. So I feel like that weekend we were all going around showing our QR codes to everybody and then I…
0:10:55.9 CR: And Signal had a QR code that puts yeah…
0:11:00.7 CR: Q signal had a QR code, and I wonder how many friends, Signal got that weekend. I have to go back and look. But yeah, it’s one of those things that then I kind of forget about it because it’s… I don’t often click on my little avatar there in the app. So I’ll have to remember to do that the next time I go to an event.
0:11:15.7 NJ: And when I meet people at events I will often then look at the will attends because from the lock screen you can tap on someone’s icon to see their profile. And from that you have the add friend button as well.
0:11:32.1 CR: Oh, okay. Yeah. Right.
0:11:33.3 NJ: So You don’t have to scan someone’s code. There’s multiple ways to add a friend.
0:11:35.0 CR: Sure. Yeah. There you go. Speaking of event caches, adding them to a calendar, that’s actually something that I only… I’m kind of ashamed to say, recently started doing. And again, kind of just one of those little things that makes a big difference.
0:11:52.1 NJ: Yeah. And we actually had an improvement that I don’t think we had release notes about because it was such a small thing. The add to calendar link in the app used to create a full day event in your calendar, and so then you still had to go to the GC code and copy it over and open the app or whatever to see when the event was actually at. But now when you tap add to calendar, it will actually create the event for the duration that the event is scheduled.
0:12:15.9 CR: Yeah. That’s great. What else about friends that comes to mind for you?
0:12:21.7 NJ: Yeah, all my friends who are geocachers are also my friends in the Geocaching app, because when I go geocaching and I am stumped and don’t know where to look, I always check the activity screen and we can see all logs, but you can also specifically see your friend’s logs and I…
0:12:41.2 CR: Very helpful if you’re looking for that phone a friend situation. Right?
0:12:44.0 NJ: And I also know which of my friends have more helpful logs or like hide little hints like you know the classic I was stumped at this location.
0:12:56.9 CR: Ah, yes.
0:12:57.0 NJ: Or there was something about nuts and bolts at a recent cache where… And the cache was a little bolt.
0:13:02.4 CR: Right.
0:13:06.7 NJ: And there was like a word joke in the log that helped me figure out what it was.
0:13:11.3 CR: We were laughing during a recent. I did a podcast interview with Ari and Jessica about the new logging flow and they expanded the number of characters that were possible for a log, which Ari loves because he types these gargantuan logs. And I hate because I have to scroll past those logs to get to ones that have some sort of a little hint, a little nugget that I can like stumped or whatever that might help me find the cache. So we were laughing about that.
0:13:42.2 NJ: Yeah. Another thing I really like is when you look at someone else’s profile, you can see their heights. So from someone else’s profile.
0:13:51.1 CR: Again, as we both go to the app.
0:13:54.6 NJ: Oh yeah. What’s the flow again.
0:13:55.3 CR: I wish we had video of this [laughter] You could see us just both looking away from each other as we’re trying to go to a cache and look at the logs, look at the activity. Okay, now I’m going to a person and there’s their heights.
0:14:06.6 NJ: There’s their heights. So yeah. So the finds and favorite points, line items, you can’t tap them. And you used to not be able to tap the heights line item, but now you can and you see a list of all of the active heights. And so I love seeing what my friends hit. I’m much more aware now what my friends have hidden than before. ‘Cause it was harder to see a list of someone else’s heights. Especially on the mobile when on the mobile, when on the phone. But also when I’m in an area where I might not know all the caches and hiders and I find a cool cache I can now see there’s another cool cache from the same CO nearby. That is one of my favorite features. You can also, another profile related cool feature we have is you can see your own finds list. So you can’t see other people’s finds, but you can see your own. And so if I wanted to show you the cache with the nuts and bolts, I can actually now find it in my finds list because I recently logged it. And so I can quickly show you, “oh, I was out. Here’s the cool cache I found.”
0:15:02.9 CR: Right. Well this is wild. I’m gonna… Again, I’m kind of, I feel a little embarrassed to say this, but I really haven’t looked at my friend’s hides via the app and it’s really kind of cool now I’m just kind of scrolling through the list of my friends and I was like “wow, I didn’t know that they owned a couple of, well, for instance, a couple of adventure… It shows of your own adventures too.” So, wow. Now I’ve.
0:15:34.0 NJ: And we just talked about Ari, when this feature came out, I looked at, because A, his geocache name states was ACs on top. So I looked at his heights and I realized he had a hide that was in walking distance from my house, [laughter]
0:15:46.1 CR: Oh, wow. I’m seeing he has two. He has one in DC in District Columbia. ‘Cause his family lives out there, so.
0:15:56.5 NJ: Yeah. And his puzzle caches are all kind of shout out to Ari.
0:16:00.5 CR: Yes. Shout out to Ari. Well, gosh, now I know what I’m doing tonight. I’ll just go through the list and play around looking at everybody’s hides. So yeah, there we go. You’ve added another thing for me to check out. And again, we kind of went over it pretty quick, but I really do like being able to look at which of my friends have logged a cache. Because again, it’s so great to be able to say, “okay, I can reach out to that person if I’m having trouble.” And it’s just so easy right there as you’re out in the field. So anything else with…
0:16:31.6 NJ: Well, friends related, adjacent lists when you plan on outing together the fortnight caches, for example, I’ll create a list and then I’ll share it with the friend that I wanna go caching with. And then they can make a copy from the website, but that all syncs with the app. So they will have the list that I created as a copy in their list tab as well.
0:16:50.8 CR: I’m not sure if we’re allowed to talk about stuff. We’re working on other stuff. I can say that. Right?
0:16:56.7 NJ: We are working on other stuff.
0:16:58.4 CR: I can’t be specific. I’m not gonna… Don’t worry, I’m not gonna spill any beans. I’m just saying we’re working on…
0:17:04.2 NJ: And I wish we had a video.
0:17:05.9 CR: We’re working on other stuff… I just, oh, I wanna say something. And I can’t say it. And I’m not going to. I’m not gonna say it.
0:17:11.6 NJ: But there’s cool stuff coming.
0:17:11.8 CR: There’s cool stuff coming. Thank you. I’m allowed to say that, right?
0:17:15.4 NJ: Yeah.
0:17:16.3 CR: You can say that?
0:17:19.4 NJ: You can always say that.
0:17:19.5 CR: It’s vague, but no, there is cool stuff coming and yeah, it’s great to be sharing your list with friends on the web and then making copies in the app. That’s great.
0:17:32.8 NJ: And then of course you can download a list for offline. I really like that feature as well, especially if I travel internationally and I’m not sure if my plan will allow me to access Connectivity.
0:17:42.8 CR: Yeah. And I still run into people that are very experienced that didn’t know you could do that so much or maybe they do most of their caching with the GPS. And they just haven’t used the app as much. And then they’ll say, Hey, is it possible to do this? Of course. Yeah. Of course. You’ve been able to do that for a long time. So I’m like you though. Well, if I’m traveling or if I’m gonna be here in Seattle, we have the mountains not too far away and you lose cell coverage. Pretty commonly out there. So having the list downloaded is really huge.
0:18:13.7 NJ: Yeah. Agreed.
0:18:17.8 CR: We wanna talk about experimental features. That’s maybe one of my favorite things about the app. And that’s a premium feature. We should mention that.
0:18:28.4 NJ: Yeah. Premium members get access to these experimental features. They’re different on iOS and Android for various reasons. Currently iOS has a couple of more and I know you are on iOS.
0:18:36.9 CR: Yeah. So, on iOS I have show favorite points on logs. I have ads/remove favorite points, view, select trackables in AR and caches with trackables. So those are the things that premium members have access to in iOS on experimental features. And before we get into talking specifically about these things, we wanna mention that, make sure that you have to go to your profile, your settings in the app, and then click on experimental features and turn on, toggle the ones that you want. And if for some reason you log out and then when you log back in, you gotta do it again. So, that’s a stumbling block for me sometimes is, sometimes I’ll either purposely log out or I’ll just be logged out for some weird reason and then I just forget to go into those experimental features and to… ‘Cause I do like seeing favorite points on logs in particular. That’s probably the one that I like the most out of what’s on there right now. And so I gotta remember to turn it back on again. So those are the things with iOS and then what do you have there on Android?
0:19:51.7 NJ: On Android we have filter for caches with trackables. So it’s an additional filter that you can turn on and MT DT grid search and which is also an additional filter, but you also see it on the statistics screen where you can… If you have not filled your grid yet. So for you these features would not be helpful Chris. There’s 80-150 loops. So how many do you have right now?
0:20:15.1 CR: It’s still a great feature.
0:20:16.8 NJ: It’s still a great feature. That one actually motivated me to fill my D/T grid because, I don’t know if you remember, but before we had that feature, I found it really difficult to figure out which caches I needed. And I reached out to you and you created multiple lists.
0:20:31.4 CR: I did.
0:20:32.0 NJ: For me to find, missing D/T grids, but with this feature I have filled my D/T grid finally.
0:20:38.0 CR: Wow. I don’t know if I knew that. When did that happen?
0:20:45.0 NJ: Oh. A while ago.
0:20:45.1 CR: Wow.
0:20:45.0 NJ: Over a year ago.
0:20:45.1 CR: Oh. Okay. Now time is, was there a party or anything or did it just kind of pass by.
0:20:48.8 NJ: It was on my HQ 20 celebration card.
0:20:51.5 CR: Oh yeah. When we put like our favorite geocaching.
0:20:58.4 NJ: Achievement. Yeah.
0:20:58.4 CR: Okay. And so I think we’ve probably done an episode about experimental features in the past, but it’s been a long time ago. So just to kind of refresh people’s memory. How would you describe what experimental features are? How do they get in there? How do they graduate out of experimental features? Just a brief overview of how the whole section, what that’s about?
0:21:20.8 NJ: Yeah, with experimental features. We have a very different process. So some of these are developed kind of very fast, so there’s not as rigorous, what I would say, like control. So they might not be fully fleshed out, they might not be working like 100%, not all the edge cases are covered. And so because of this kind of very fast process, the two platforms are not in the same track. So there’s a little bit of flexibility as well for developers to work on one thing more than another. And so that’s kind of how the two platforms get out of sync. But because we wanna sometimes move fast and put out cool things, but we value having the platforms be in alignment with experimental features. This was kind of the space that we created to put in things in front of premium members before they are ready to get out into the world.
0:22:07.5 NJ: And sometimes they don’t get out into the world. So some features in the experimental features menu might not be used very often or they end up not actually solving a problem. And so we do monitor the data, but once we decide that it is ready to graduate and so the profile, for example, that did start out as an experimental feature when they graduate to the full app, so to say, then we make sure that the platforms are aligned and that everything works and all the edge cases and offline stays and everything is fully functioning.
0:22:41.1 CR: Okay. So you generally want to have, like you were saying, both apps be consistent. And so in order for a feature to move on, it has to be ready to move on in both Android and iOS?
0:22:53.9 NJ: Yeah, so for the most part we want the apps to be in parity. But for example iOS has Siri and Android doesn’t. So if we ever did something with Siri, we would not be able to have the apps in parity.
0:23:03.5 CR: Well, we have listed a lot of things for people to check out and for me to check out. I think I’ve caught myself with at least a handful of different features that I need to. And like I said, I’ll spend the rest of today looking through my friend’s hides, their list of hides via the app. I don’t know. Do you think we covered?
0:23:24.4 NJ: Yeah.
0:23:24.9 CR: We covered a lot, didn’t we?
0:23:27.1 NJ: I would be interested if any of the listeners have favorite features that we didn’t list.
0:23:30.7 CR: Sure. Yeah. Put those in the comments there on the podcast page or when we release this on social media. I feel like I just like to keep talking. We haven’t seen each other in a while. [laughter], anything else you want to cover while we’re here? Okay. Well, in the meantime…
0:23:50.1 NJ: In the meantime.
0:23:50.5 CR: This was great and it’s always fun to hear what the mobile team is up to. I see they’re all meeting together. Most of you I think are together this week here at HQ.
0:24:02.5 NJ: Yeah we’re all in the office.
0:24:02.6 CR: Yeah. And hopefully, I’m sure planning some exciting stuff for the coming months and into 2024. And so it’ll be fun to see what comes out.
0:24:11.9 NJ: Yeah. I’m looking forward to be back and talking about the cool stuff that’s coming.
0:24:16.6 CR: Ooh, the cliffhanger. I love it. She’s shaking her head [laughter], but she already said it. We’re gonna hold her to it. All right. Thank you Nicole.
0:24:25.5 NJ: Thanks Chris.
0:24:25.5 CR: That was Nicole, the product manager for HQ’s mobile team. Open up the official Geocaching app and check out some of the stuff that we talked about. And like Nicole said, if there are features that you especially like tell us about it in the comments section of the podcast page. And if there’s something you would like us to cover on our podcast, send an email to podcast@geocaching.com. Until then, from me and Nicole and all the lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.