combine offline lists with bookmark lists

[jasper]

First of all: thanks for making this great app. It always makes me happy using it. 

One question: do you think it would make sense to combine the bookmark lists and the offline lists that you have? I know it is possible to make an offline list from a bookmark list. But currently the offline lists are not stored at geocaching.com, so I do not have access to these lists on web or on other apps. And second, when I look at a cache details, I cannot add that cache to a bookmark list. Third, I think it can be confusing to support two lists of cache lists in the app. I would guess that combining it to an offline bookmark list would be simpler to use and would provide more functionality.

I can imagine that a drawback could be that you will have to store more information about the bookmarks lists locally. But if you default to "Lite cache data", I don't think that will be too much data.

[rragan]

Geocaching.com limits the number of bookmark lists. Offline lists are not limited. Bookmark lists could not store all the content an offline list can. If you upload your offline lists to Dropbox periodically, you can get to them in lots of ways. 

It would be cool if Cachly could auto upload a changed offline list to Dropbox periodically but that would just be a nicety. 

[jasper]

41 minutes ago, rragan said:

Bookmark lists could not store all the content an offline list can.

That doesn't matter to me. In my app, the (theoretical) offline bookmark list would store all the content that the current offline lists store. But the GC code is synced with the bookmark lists on geocaching.com. That way, I have a unified set of lists, but I still have all the advantages of the cach.ly offline lists.

[jasper]

2 hours ago, rragan said:

Geocaching.com limits the number of bookmark lists.

Interesting. Is that a limit that many people reach or is it more a theoretical limit? If it is a theoretical limit, I wouldn't worry about that too much. If it is a relatively small number (like max 10 lists) maybe a solution would be to make the bookmark lists a subset of the offline bookmark lists: All bookmark lists in geacoaching.com will become cach.ly offline bookmark lists. But once the limit is reached, you can still add offline bookmark lists they will not be synced to geocaching.com anymore.

[rragan]

I'm not certain but I think the limit was 100 bookmark lists. It also used to be the case that the number of caches in a bookmark list was limited to 500. That may have been increased to 1000 to be in concert with PQ size limit. It seems like one would end up with unexpected behaviors if Cachly's unlimited lists were mapped to limited GC bookmark lists. 

[Nic Hubbard]

5 hours ago, jasper said:

when I look at a cache details, I cannot add that cache to a bookmark list

You can do this. Just tap the ... button and choose Add Bookmark.

5 hours ago, jasper said:

Third, I think it can be confusing to support two lists of cache lists in the app. I would guess that combining it to an offline bookmark list would be simpler to use and would provide more functionality.

This isn't something that we want to do. Bookmark lists are indeed stored on geocaching.com, but when we retrieve the list and load an individual list we are still limited to fetching 50 caches at a time from that list that you loaded because of API limitations. So, say you have 20 lists, with 200 caches in each list, we would need to make 80 API requests to fetch all of those caches from your bookmark lists.

Bookmark lists just aren't something that we plan to integrate into our Offline lists feature.

[hidegoseek]

I average around 40 bookmark lists at any given time, but there's only one (1) that I routinely want loaded on Cachly.  I can't think of a reason to have the other 39 lists crowding my Cachly.  

[jasper]

Clear. I can see the technical and logical problems. But from a logical perspective I don't see any advantage of have two lists of lists with caches. 

[Nic Hubbard]

4 minutes ago, jasper said:

But from a logical perspective I don't see any advantage of have two lists of lists with caches. 

It is only to mirror the feature that is available on geocaching.com and some users like to use since bookmark lists could be viewable in any third-party app or website.