iPhone Mobile App - general beta tester feedback

It would be nice if the location "bread crumbs" at the top of a route page were active navigation buttons (ie "Colorado" -> "Boulder" -> "Eldorado Canyon SP" -> etc). Especially when you select a route on the classics list for an area and want to quickly see what's nearby. Maybe just a quick button to take you to the parent area (ie, "Bastille - N Face") would be enough.

Would be really nice for some areas if the sub-areas were location sorted too (ie, Golden Cliffs/North Table) instead of listing each "Wall" there in alphabetical. But I can certainly see how that wouldn't be practical for all areas.

Need an iPad1 tester?

I tested on ipad one over the weekend and on Tuesday at Rumney. Works great. I compared head to head with the new Rumney app from Alpinewerx.

I would like to see more routes..definitely stuff missing compared to the other app. Better maps and route photos....I understand that this is all user loaded content and we get what we load.

I 'll be at Red River with it next week.

Great job on this app love it.

I would love to see a map maybe even using the map already on the Iphone.

Maybe even a tick list?

Impressed so far. I had the crash upon trying to download the Boulder area on Iphone4. Tried again and worked fine.

It would be cool if you added a "personal beta" tab to the routes. Would be a nice way to keep track of routes you have attempted, etc.

My feedback so far:

- In general, love it! Simple layout and navigation, no confusion or frustration.
- Same problem as several others, the first time I tapped some of the areas to open them, the app closed. Always opens fine after that though.
- Alphabetical listing of downloaded areas would be nice.
- Got a download error trying to load the "Golden" area.
- I can't imagine allowing mobile photo uploads or commenting, I think it would populate the database with loads of useless, twitter like content as well as crappy photos.

My 2 cents for now. Great work guys!

Just downloaded the App today, as I have been traveling. Overall great and I am super stoked on the whole thing.
Few of the bad things:
1. App closes/crashes if you click an area on startup and the app hasnt loaded (pretty much I got too excited and was too fast)
2. Seems like you have to click through so many pages to find the climb, not that you don't have to do this on the real site either, but its a little weird at first.

Hopefully I will go climb this afternoon and use it at a place where the guidebook only covers half the climbs and Mountain Project lists all the climbs :)

Let me know when you are going to test the droid verision. I can help with that.

fyi, in the meantime since I'm not a tester and have an android phone, i've been using "read it later" which allows you to save webpages on the phone on pc and allows you to sync and view later offline. Helpful...but only saves the page - not subpages - so you gotta do it for every route.

Great app overall, simple to use and navigate, surprisingly fast downloads that don't take up much memory.

It would be nice to be able to "navigate" through an area, via the app itself, before deciding to download. Right now, I just navigate the regular site on my computer or phone, then open the app and download what I want.

The left to right orientation feature is great, using this outdoors gives me a new appreciation for "cliff-wide" photos (with routes listed) or maps that get you situated.

Having a notes section would be nice so you could jot down gear beta, impressions, etc while you are at the crag.

One limitation is the way images are downloaded. It appears that a low-res image is downloaded initially, then, while still in network range, you have to click each image to activate a full download. I was limited on one occasion when, at the crag and out of cell range, I was unable to get useful data from an overview/topo becuase words, route numbers, etc were too pixelated to read. It would be nice to have a "super-download" mode that goes ahead and gets full resolution images, at the expense of a longer download time.

Or simply grabs super high res images of the beta photos. That way you know you'd have a topo somewhere.

Very nicely done!

I agree that being able to rotate to landscape mode for photos would be nice.

As far as I can tell, the images in the packages are lower res and updated when clicked if there's a connection. It also looks like the higher res images stay downloaded so they're available when the connection is off. Topos and beta photos would be the most handy to have at the crag, so right now you would have to remember to download them while you have a connection.

Would it be possible to have an option to get photos marked as "beta photos" included in the data packs at full resolution? This would make tagging images as beta photos provide more value than it does on the regular site.

[edit: I missed that someone else had already noted this.]

Thanks for putting the energy into this product! It has been great for me as I've used it dozens of times throughout Boulder. I haven't had any glitches or shutdowns.

I would chime in with Mike M. that I have been challenged with navigating the site at times. When I view a specific route it would be extremely useful in my workflow if I could could then click on the regions listed above it to quickly navigate back into a greater region i.e.

Colorado
Boulder
Flatirons
North
Third Flatiron

These areas are displayed at the top of the screen but not "clickable" This becomes a much bigger hassle when using the "classic routes" option.

It would also be incredible if the embedded search engine on the iPhone App (and on the website) could get you to an area even if it is mis-spelled i.e. searching for "turncorner" doesn't get you any results, since it is spelled "turnkorner." I realize this a challenging undertaking, but it would be slick if the search would bring up similar items, not just the exact one.

wow...so is there a list or somewhere to get in on the beta testing? this looks awesome!

Spent the weekend at Maple Canyon using the app. The day before heading out I spent about an hour searching for route info and photos that I thought would be helpful while there. Having spent time there before I knew that there is no cell service so I thought this would be a good test of the app. Everything worked great with one exception, even though I had previously looked at the beta photos I was going to use they would not load without cell service all I could get was very blurry pics that were useless. Other then that the app worked great! We even found some great routes that are not in the guide book.

Hope this is helpful.

saxfiend wrote: Andy, I would strongly favor keeping this app strictly as a guidebook (no forums even) and allow user input ONLY through the website. Aside from the technical hurdles, I think your assessment above is absolutely right: content on Mountain Project will be significantly degraded if you allow user input from the iPhone app. JL

+1 to keeping this strictly a guide. I'd rather not have to sift through all the bad iphone pictures and hastily typed text slang comments while trying to find good climbing info. Its not that hard to write down or even remember what you'd like to post to MP then go home later and post it via a computer.

We're releasing a new version today, so I'm locking this forum. If you are a beta tester with comments about the new version (build 11), please go here:

mountainproject.com/v/round…