Image description

My wife and I have been pretty quiet on here recently and haven't gone on many trips since this past winter. I have been hard at work learning a new programming language to build a new Android and iPhone app that all hikers, backpackers, kayakers, or any other type of adventurer can use to plan their next trip!

Our app is called "Don't Forget The Spoon" and is mobile application that lets you keep track of all the gear you own in your own private "Gear Locker" on your phone. You can then build different "Packs" for different adventures to analyze pack stats like weight.

We decided to build this app because.... you guessed it we often forget to pack our spoons when we go on backpacking adventures. With our app, you can mark items as packed to easily keep track of all your gear while packing for a big trip!

Download App

Download Don't Forget the Spoon in your phone's app store now!

If you try the app out please make a thread in this forum and let me know what you think! I got a lot of awesome stuff planned!

Additionally since I have not coded out the onboarding experience yet here are some pictures and tips below!

Pack List

The packlist is where you will create and access your different 'packs' for your adventures. Before creating a pack I recommend you first go to your "Gear Locker" and add gear. Items in your "Gear Locker" will be available to add into your packs.

Image description

Gear Locker

The Gear locker is a list of all the items you own. You can click the + button in the bottom right to add gear.

Image description

While adding gear you can input:

  • Item Name
  • Manufacturer
  • Item Type
  • Pack Category
  • Item Weight
  • Temperature rating (only used for items like sleeping bags etc. )
  • Volume (Only Used for packs, water bottle etc. )
  • Calories (Only used for meals and snacks)

If share with community is marked as "yes" then the item will be reviewed and added to the community database to help users find gear to add. More on this in the next section. If you do not want to share gear info you can mark that to "no"

There are drop downs for some of these fields that filter as you type. You can type free form and type anything if it is not found in the drop down. If you feel something should be added to any of the drop down, let us know! This is the beta and we are adding things daily!

Image description

Find Gear

The find gear section is the community database of gear. This is another way to add gear to your Gear Locker if you do not want to manually type the details in. Since this is community built its not super full right now, but I am adding items weekly. Feel free to give it a spin!

Image description

Packs

Once you have some items in your Gear Locker you can start adding items to your pack! Just like adding gear to your Gear Locker you can add items from your gear locker to your pack by clicking the + icon in the bottom right inside of a pack.

Image description

When you click the + button you will be presented with a list of all the items in your Gear Locker. Tap each items you want to add to your pack and a check box will appear.

Image description

If you are like me and have a lot of items in your Gear Locker, you can quickly filter this list by tapping the search icon at the top and typing an item name or manufacturer name.

Image description

By tapping on an item in your pack you can edit its details such as quantity, Worn Weight, Consumable, or if the item is packed or not. Just make sure to click the "Save Edits" once done.

Image description

Once you have some items in your pack you can explore the pack detail cards by swiping to the left on the top half.

The first initial card shows total Pack Weight. summary and shows weights broken down by Item Pack category. Any of the bar graphs can be tapped, and this will filter the list of items. So for example if I want to just see my "Clothing" items, I can tap the clothing bar graph and it auto filters to just those items:

Image description

The next card shows a break down of your weight by base weight, consumable weight and work weight. Again just like the previous card you can tap any of the bar graph bars and it will filter your list to only show the Base Weight Items, Consumable Weight Items or Worn Weight items.

Image description

The next card will show you the percent packed. As you are packing items for your trip you can mark them as packed. Previously I mentioned you could tap and item to edit it and mark it as packed. The shortcut to packing items, is you can swipe right on an item in your list and it will mark it as packed. Or Swipe left to unpack an item quickly. As you pack items the percent pack will automatically update.

Image description

The last card is just a summary of items by manufacturer in your pack. Again you can tap any of the bar graphs to then filter your list to just see all the items from that one manufacturer.

Image description

Overall this is the initial beta of the app. There are a lot more features to come that are on my current roadmap! Please try out the app and share your honest feedback with me! Excited to see what you all think!

10 days later

New update now live on Android and iPhone. Now you can share a link of the packs you put together with your friends!

Here is a photography winter day hiking pack I used this passed weekend up in Big Bear (Trip report coming soon): https://dfts.app/#?id=lVeSBUHoLX52zPqAiB9A

Image description

4 days later

Is there a way to integrate with lighterpack? I already have my gearlists built out on there but otherwise would be super interested in using the app.

    rysybel thanks for the interest! Right now there is not, but once I tweak some of my apps basic features I will be looking into export lighterpack lists into my app. With the holidays I can't say what that timeline looks like at this point though.

    With Thanksgiving this week in the United States, a lot of us have calories on our minds with all the turkey and food we are about to eat 😃

    Un-related to turkey day but related to calorie counting and tracking I just pushed another beta release to both Android and iPhone yesterday that is all about Calorie tracking! This is the initial feature release for calorie tracking and will be tweaked and improved over the next few weeks. For now it tracks total calories in your packs based on the food added, and estimates hours or days worth of food based on the estimated calories per day slider.

    Image description

    17 days later

    Pushed out a new update yesterday for both Android and iPhone. The new update adds more options to user settings for selecting what weight format you see your pack data in. These are all the options now:

    • lbs and oz: This shows all gear 1 pound and over in pounds and all gear under 1 pound in ounces
    • lbs: all gear shown in pounds
    • oz: all hear shown in ounces
    • Kg and g: This shows all gear 1 kilogram and over in kilograms and all gear under 1 kilogram in grams
    • Kg: shows all gear in kilograms
    • g: shows all gear in grams

    In this release I also added 9 new default gear types to the built in list and 3 new brands.

    New update officially live for both Android and iPhone:

    • Sort pack items by weight desc or asc instead of alphabetical order is now an option in the user settings
    • Fixed a small bug when viewing lbs were not being converted to ounces in pack view
    • Added 4 more brands to auto-complete list
    • Added 3 more item types to auto complete list

    Image description

    a month later

    There have been an entire list of bug fixes over the holidays! App should be pretty smooth and be working as expected, but of course if you find any issues let me know! Had a lot of users join over the holidays so there was some great bug hunting 😉

    Along with lots of bug fixes I cleaned up the setting page a whole lot, it now looks somewhat profesional. I also just pushed a new release last night, which is live for Android and should be live for iOS by the end of the week which adds quick remove item from pack from the edit item view. You can now click an item and click the X in the top right to quickly remove that item from your pack:

    Image description

    Enjoy!

    5 days later

    Wanted to add some onboarding help for new users. I would say 95% of the app is pretty obvious how to use it but there are a couple of things like swiping right to pack an item that are not visually obvious to users. Now new users will see options to view video tutorials in two different locations in the app.

    1st area is when you first open the app. If you have no packs great or no gear added to your gear locker you will now see an option to watch a "Quick Start Tutorial Video" which will show you how to add gear and create your first pack.

    Image description

    A second tutorial video viewing option will show on any empty pack. This video will show you tips for managing your pack on Don't Forget the Spoon:

    Image description

    If interested you can watch the full tutorial which is both of the above videos combined into one here on YouTube:

    17 days later

    Another big update pushed out for both iPhone and Android this week! Pro subscribers can now upload images of all their gear as well! As a visual person, this makes it a lot easier for myself when planning out a pack. For example instead of remember the exact name of each of the 4 or 5 different types of tent stakes that I have, I can now just add them real quick based on what they look like.

    I also upgraded the app to Material 3, which is the new design standard from Google:

    Image description

    Image description

    23 days later

    New update live in the Android App store, and the iPhone iOS store!

    Updates include:

    • Added the ability to un-pack all gear in a pack with one click
    • Can now search for 'is-packed' and 'not-packed' in pack search bar to see all packed or all not packed items
    • Tapping the packed percentage circle now toggles 'not-packed' search
    • Cleaned up setting page

    Image description

    Image description

    13 days later

    Small update pushed out to both Android and iPhone last week.

    • Added a link to a new Discord Chat Community as another avenue to share feedback.
    • A few extra default brands and item types added.
    10 days later
    MikeJones stickied the discussion .

    Small update now live on Android and iOS that fixes a bug that would crash the app when you delete a pack or delete an item from your Gear Locker. Now that I cleared that up, next update should have a new small but useful feature!

    Also created a subreddit if reddit is more your thing for leaving feedback. I will post updates there as well, along with respond to app feedback etc.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/DontForgetTheSpoon/

    Pushed out another new update tonight! ALready live for Android, should be approved for iPhone sometime next week. iPhone app reviews have been going a bit quicker lately so maybe it will be live this weekend if we are lucky 🤞

    Updates:

    • Added the ability to duplicate a pack. This makes it easy if you have 80-90% of the same items in one pack vs another. This will especially help through hikers who have slight changes in equipment for different section of the PCT or AT.
    • Added a link to a new DFTS subreddit as another way to share feedback and get updates.

    To access the duplicate pack button, click the 3 dots in the top right for more options when viewing a pack and you will see "Duplicate Pack" as an option:

    Image description

    Once you click "Duplicate Pack" a dialog will pop up where you can name the pack and type a description:

    Image description

    Once you click "Duplicate Pack" after naming it, an entire new pack will be created with the same gear as the pack you picked to duplicate. To open the new pack just go back to your Pack List!

    16 days later

    Happy Easter for those that celebrate!

    New update went live both for Android and iOS last night. Similar to the last update I pushed out that added the ability to duplicate packs, someone made a request for the ability to duplicate items. Keep the feedback coming!

    Small update, added the ability to duplicate items in your gear locker. This helps if you have items where 90% of the fields are the same. You can duplicate it and then edit the new item.

    Enjoy and happy packing!

    5 days later

    Been working hard the last couple of weeks on a decent sized update. Through conversation I have noticed a handful of users like using Don't Forget The Spoon on tablets. Unfortunately I had only optimized the app for small mobile screens. The app has worked on tablets and larger screens functionally, but basically looks like crap on anything bigger than a mobile phone.

    I have not released the tablet update just yet.... but for testing purposes, if you share a link to a pack with friends they can now view your pack on their desktop or tablet in the webview and it will now look a whole lot better! I wanted to get a few users testing the new view before pushing out the update for tablets. Expect that Update Sometime next week.

    Until then you can check out some of my packs here:

    Here is a screenshot from my desktop web browser on my Macbook Pro:

    Image description

    4 days later

    1st Phase of Tablet optimizations are now live in both the Android App Store and iOS app store!

    There are still a few views that I think need some refining. Overall the app now has much better optimization on larger Android and iOS devices and is no longer a complete eye sore.

    Image description

    If you own an tablet please give it a try and let me know what you think! Additionally some other exciting news, is that if you own an Apple Computer with an M1 chip you can actually install Don't Forget the Spoon on your desktop now!

    Apple allows users with M1 or great to install iPhone apps onto the desktop, so you can find us in the Mac OS App Store and run us on your desktop computer!

    Image description

    Image description

    I know this only supports recent Mac computers and does not support older hardware or PC at this time. The foundation is now laid for the GUI and I can look into more desktop options in the future.

    12 days later

    Another fun little update for those of you who like to share with others! For awhile now you could always share a link to your packs. Now you can share an image of your Pack Weight summary Widget!

    Just tap the "Pack Weight Summary" text at the top to begin!

    Image description

    After clicking the "Pack Weight Summary" text you will see a quick preview of the image you will be able to share. Then click the share button, to share your pack weight summary image to your favorite social network, email, or friend via text message!

    Image description

    The image you share will look something like this:

    Image description

    As always this is kind of a fun proof of concept for me, let me know what you think and I can evolve this feature further!

    6 days later

    A few small updates pushed out and now live for both Android and iOS:

    • Editing Gear in gear locker now auto updates that specific item in all packs that the item is in.
    • Made summary cards in pack slightly larger.
    • Reduced white space in between items in pack.
    • Added item type to search results when searching community gear.

    Here is a quick look at the slight visual changes in the pack view. Most probably won't notice much, but I think it looks slightly better:

    Image description

    And here is a quick look at the community search results now that item type is added as well:

    Image description