Guthook Guides for iPhone have a big change coming up

[guthook]

Anyone who uses any of our Guthook's Guides apps on an iPhone or iPad will want to take a quick look over here-- due to a policy change in the App Store, our iOS apps are being consolidated into one. Please take a look at the full announcement, and feel free to get in touch with us either on this thread or at [email protected] (but please be patient-- as you can imagine, I'll probably be answering a lot of emails in the coming weeks! ;-) )

TL;DR: AT Hiker for iPhone will be updated tomorrow and change to "Guthook Guides". All of our other iPhone apps (PCT, CDT, JMT, etc.) will be available in this app, and no longer will be available as separate apps from the App Store. **Nothing is changing for Android**

If you're on the Trail right now, this might be a bit of an inconvenience. If you're at home and not planning to get out on the trail for a week or two, you should be fine-- I'll be continuing to work out bugs in the app and improve it as we hear about any issues that come up.

Happy trails!

[Starchild]

It seems the logical thing to do, why have them separate? It also seems a better way to distributing your work. With that said switching trail segments should be easier, I have always had to hunt for that.

[guthook]

It seems the logical thing to do, why have them separate? It also seems a better way to distributing your work. With that said switching trail segments should be easier, I have always had to hunt for that.

Are you familiar with the term "legacy feature"? They were always separate apps because they were always separate apps ;-)

I do agree that it's much better this way, but the largest obstacle was just the effort of making the major changes in the first place. We generally focus our programming time on important new features or bugs that need to be fixed, rather than improving something that is already working well enough. In this case, having a separate app for each trail system was working "well enough". And, to be fair, having separate apps was a major factor in our initial ability to reach folks, since we had no name recognition at first, and the search feature in the App Store was never very good with keywords-- it worked much better for app titles.

Anyway, now that we do have the name recognition, I do think that the combined app is going to be much better for us going forward. Sometimes we just need an external jolt to get us to change some big things like this ;-)

As for switching trail segments, I have some ideas for that, but I'm not sure when I'll be able to implement them. Like I said... things that work well enough for now are not at the top of the priority list, but it is definitely on my list of things I would love to have done next year. Just don't start holding your breath yet!

[MisterMoon]

Planning to use the app starting a section hike on Friday. If I don't update the app will I be OK?

[Starchild]

You do great work and is much appreciated and valued and yes I do understand the legacy features and app store recognition and gald you are at the point where one app may be better then multiple.

[guthook]

Planning to use the app starting a section hike on Friday. If I don't update the app will I be OK?

Yep! You can avoid the update as long as you like, really, although I'd recommend not putting it off forever, since we're adding lots of good features in the future. The databases that the app reads from will not change with the update, though, so if you don't update an app, the trail info and waypoint info will still stay up-to-date going forward. It's just the program features (like bug fixes, new capabilities, and so on) that you'll need to update the app for.

[guthook]

You do great work and is much appreciated and valued and yes I do understand the legacy features and app store recognition and gald you are at the point where one app may be better then multiple.

Thanks Starchild! We're also planning a lot of new features in the app in the next few months, which would have come about a little sooner if not for the work we had to do combining the apps, but we're pretty much back on track now. I'll make some more announcements about those features once the consolidated app is mostly rolled out. Lots of things that have been requested in the past, and a few others. I'll have to leave it at that for now :-)

[Hatchet_1697]

Appreciate the heads-up on the change. SW development is hard work for many reasons and your apps are great, thank you for creating them. They are so useful on the trail. In the merge please give us a setting to preset a trail as our default. I have the PCT and AT apps now but am focusing on the AT for the next few years. So I’d like those maps to automatically come up when I launch the app without an added step of selecting it. Thanks!


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[guthook]

Appreciate the heads-up on the change. SW development is hard work for many reasons and your apps are great, thank you for creating them. They are so useful on the trail. In the merge please give us a setting to preset a trail as our default. I have the PCT and AT apps now but am focusing on the AT for the next few years. So I’d like those maps to automatically come up when I launch the app without an added step of selecting it. Thanks!

Thanks Hatchet!

The update will be available in the next few hours, but the way I've set it up already is that when you go to switch trail sections, rather than jumping to a list of a hundred trail sections (all AT, all PCT, all CDT, etc.), the trail selection screen is split into two levels. One level is what were previously individual apps, and the second level is what was in the app. When you hit the trail selector button, the screen opens at the second level, and you can go back to the first level from there. Does that make sense? Basically, if you're in the AT Section 1, and you press Trail Selector, you go to a list of AT sections. You can select any of those, or you can hit "back" and go to a list of "apps" like PCT Hiker, CDT Hiker, and so on.

And as I mentioned to Starchild, I'll hopefully have something very different and way more intuitive in the future. It just isn't at the tippy-top of the priority list just yet :-)

[Offshore]

Just had the update come in. It showed a indicator that it was downloading files after the app updated, but after it finished, the File Manager screen shows "File Missing" for both trails and waypoints for sections I had purchased. Uninstalling, reinstalling, and restoring past purchases seems to have fixed it.

[Starchild]

What happened to my Camino sections? I had (and bought) the entire Camino Frances but with this update I only have a segment from St Jean Pied de Port to Pamplona.

[Starchild]

Actually the AT is not working either, I can't even see the AT on the map. Also no indication of the elevation profile.

[tflaris]

We are lost in Kansas anymore.

I updated and restored purchases. I clicked on the FT (a trail Guide previously purchased) and I got this on the screen.



Notice the map States S Florida but it looks like I’m on the AT but there’s no trail info.

TF


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[Sovi]

perhaps info best sent to guthook support?

[Offshore]

What happened to my Camino sections? I had (and bought) the entire Camino Frances but with this update I only have a segment from St Jean Pied de Port to Pamplona.

Actually the AT is not working either, I can't even see the AT on the map. Also no indication of the elevation profile.

Try deleting and reinstalling the app. Then restore your purchases. Worked for me (see post 10).

[guthook]

I think we've just set a record for ourselves for number of emails received in one day :-)

Two bugs seem to be affecting a lot of people, but they're both relatively easy to fix on your end, and I am already working on a permanent fix for them in the next update to the app (hopefully next week if I can get some time between answering emails...). Here we go for the first two solutions. Please spread the word:

1- If you open a trail section and find that there are no waypoints or trails drawn on the map, please make sure you have a good internet connection and wait just a minute or two— the app is downloading a lot of info to start with, and the waypoints and tracks may be lower down on that list than other things that are coming in first. If they don’t show up within a minute or so, open the Menu, then choose “File Manager”. The first two lines should say “Trails” and “Waypoints”. Press and hold on each of these lines until a popup asks you to download the files. This will force the app to download the file again.

2- If, in the File Manager section for a given trail, you have no options for offline maps, and the background topo maps don’t show up on the map screen, close the app down for a little while, then try opening it again. It might help to quit the app entirely before opening it again. So far, the map download options have returned within a few minutes in all cases. It just takes a little time.


Now, if your purchases from other of our apps haven't transferred over to the new app, you can let me know directly by email. Usually it's because you either don't have iCloud Drive enabled for one of the apps, or because the purchase info wasn't saved to iCloud Drive during one of the first app updates that did this... so you can contact me directly in that case. [email protected]

Thanks everyone!

[tflaris]

This is pretty much what I’m getting for every section.


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[Starchild]

AT is now working, El Camino still only the eastern section.

[kestral]

Glitches bad on my I pad, smooth transition on I phone 6s. With I pad I deleated app then reinstalled as suggested in post 10 with good results. Great app, I esp like the updated water availability by users. Could be improved with a list of shuttle providers for different areas.

[guthook]

I'm making progress already, and will hopefully have the two most persistent bugs fixed by the weekend. In the meantime, please see post #16 in this thread. I'm trying to answer emails as fast as I can while still working on the bug fixes :-) Thanks again for understanding, everyone!