Small update pushed yesterday. Its live in the Android app store right now and will be live in the iPhone app store by the end of the week.

I worked a lot of small stuff on the backend but the one new feature users will be able to use was a customer requested feature! If you have images of gear in your pack, you can now choose to make the images for a specific pack public. This allows individuals that you share your public pack link with to see the images as well and not just text. To see an example you can check out my El Cajon Pack here: https://dfts.app/#?id=8XbFH9JA2qgjf9gGaR35

If you have images in your pack and want to enable public images just click the 3 dots in the top right while viewing a pack and click edit:

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Now when you are editing the pack there is a new toggle that you can enable to allow images to be public when you share a link:

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If you enable that toggle, then click save images will be viewable when you share links with your friends!

17 days later

Continuing to make small steps to the next bigger update. Last night I pushed an update for both iPhone and Android which are both live now. Latest updates allow you to mark a pack as public or private. You can choose whether to make a pack public or private when creating a pack or after creating a pack.

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If you have shared links to your pack in the past make sure you update the app and mark those packs as public if you want the links to continue working. If packs are private and you have shared links, visitors will see the pack marked as private and will not be able to view the contents.

This is the next step in adding the ability to have a database of packs shared by other users in the app. I plan to add a way to find other users public packs shortly.

The next step before that big release though is to add tags to packs. This will help users find your packs and sort through list of packs in the future.

7 days later

Small update went live yesterday for both Android and iOS. A user reported a bug over on our reddit, which you can read here.

That bug is no more! Back to coding new features 😃

18 days later

New update uploading to the Android and iOS app stores now! This update adds the ability to add tags to packs. These tags will be used for the next big release which will add a a new tab to the main navigation that will allow you to browse pre-made packs from other users!

The tags will allow you to filter all the user created packs to find ones you may be interested in checking out. If you have a cool pack you want to share with the Dont Forget The Spoon Community, start marking them as public and adding tags now in preparation for the next big release!

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These are just a few default tags I through together please let me know if you have any other suggestions for tags to be added as options.

5 days later

Pushed out a small update last night with a bug fix. Non-pro users would run into an issue when clicking the add photo button. This issue is now fixed and doesn't fail in an ugly way. Bug was reported on our Discord channel by a user.

6 days later

Big update pushed out yesterday night for both Android and iPhone! A New tab as introduced to our bottom navigation, which allows you to find packs marked public by other users to the app!

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When you navigate to the new tab to search for public packs, you will see a tag cloud at the top. To begin looking for other individuals packs, select a tag to start your search.

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While searching you can select multiple tags to refine your search as well!

As with most features in my app this is the first iteration of this feature and expect it to morph and shape overtime. I have a few near term features planned that should be in the next release or two that will add some additional functionality to browsing public packs!

One thing to note, marking packs and public is fairly new feature as well so expect the number of packs to show up here to grow over time ;-)

Appreciate the patience as the community grows!

19 days later

New update pushed out yesterday for Android an iOS. Adds the ability to thumbs up a public pack to show your love and appreciation!

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Go explore the public packs, and vote for your favorites! Also create some awesome packs if you think you have what it takes to be the best pack in the app!

17 days later

Small update pushed out last week. Added a few extra default item types but also added links to formal documentation on how to use the app! New users will now see buttons to check out the documentation before they start building packs and adding items to their gear locker. Anyone can find links to the documentation in the settings!

Check out the documentation here: https://dontforgetthespoon.com/docs/intro

Please provide feedback as well! The documentation is not complete yet, but there is enough right now to make it useful to new and expert users.

9 days later

Small update pushed out this week.

  • Documentation now opens in a new browser window and not inside the app. Once user got confused and didn't know how to close the documentation when it opened within the app
  • Cleaned up the 'Edit Default Categories' page in settings. It was looking ugly and needed a makeover. Instead of big ugly buttons that say "Remove" on each item, there are now trash can icons that you can tap to remove categories.

Update out on Android and iOS.

p.s Continued to work on the documentation as well. Find Gear and Find Packs sections now complete.

12 days later

Another update live in both Android and iOS app stores!

  • Added R-Value option for sleeping pads
  • Fixed an issue when swiping an item to mark it as packed when filtered by 'not packed' would mark multiple items as packed.
  • Now provide user feedback with a loading bar while unpacking entire pack or deleting an entire pack.
a month later

Huge new update live on Android and iOS app stores today!

Here is a quick rundown of what's new:

  • Sub Packs (Pro only): You can now create sub-packs for an easier way to add items to your packs. Enjoy!

  • Auto-consumable items: All items marked as 'Water', 'Snack', or 'Meal' will now be automatically marked as consumable when added to a pack.

  • Direct email link: A link has been added to the settings menu to allow you to send us direct emails.

Sub-packs have been a highly requested feature. With sub-packs, you can create groupings of items so that you can add them all to a pack at once. This eliminates the need to add each item individually. Some examples of sub-packs you might create include a medical kit or a sleep system.

When adding gear to a pack, you will now see two tabs: "Gear Locker Items" and "Sub Packs". The "Gear Locker Items" tab is the same as before, listing all of your individual gear locker items. The "Sub Packs" tab will only show packs that you have created and designated as sub-packs. To add a sub-pack to your pack, simply tap on it. All of the gear in that sub-pack will be added to your pack with a single tap.

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Right now I have one Sub Pack, for my Photography Gear. When I tap the Photography Sub Pack it will add all my Photography gear to my pack. See my Sub Pack Below:

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I made it so you have to designate a Sub Pack so that the sub pack list didn't get over crowded with every pack that you have ever created and only shows ones that you would use as a Sub Pack.

To designate a Sub Pack you can just select the Sub Pack Option when creating or editing a pack. Since I added another option I also cleaned up the pack creation and pack editing view and replaced the ugly toggles with boxes. Its not quite where I want it but its better then it was before. Expect some more tweaks in the weeks and months ahead.

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19 days later

This week has been the 1 year anniversary since I launched Don't Forget The Spoon to the public! With that, on the apps actual public launch Birthday I pushed out an update last night with one of the most requested features!

CSV Import is now available for pro users! Have a bunch of gear you want to add but don't want to type it in on your phone, upload it from one CSV file!

For more info check out the documentation here.

Enjoy and please provide feedback. I did a lot of testing but there may be one or two bugs. If you run into anything let me know and I will get it fixed ASAP :-)

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6 days later

One of the worst parts of DFTS was the search in the "Find Gear" tab. It worked but was not forgiving at all. Basically needed exact work matches to find anything. Well today thats all changed! Search is improved a ton with the last update!

You can now have bad spelling, put words out of order etc. and if its in the public approved database then you should not have any issues with it showing up in your search results!

With that, I just wanted to thank everyone over the last year who has subscribed or purchased a pro account. These funds were re-invested back into the app and as a result I was able to implement a much improved public gear search feature :-)

Now that I have improved search, I will also continue deliberately building the public gear database in addition to the crowd source data you all help build every day!

5 days later

Across all my avenues of support I recently received the request for some improvements to how worn weight is calculated in the app.

Previously if you marked an item as "Worn Weight" and you had the quantity for that item as anything more then one, it counted all those items as worn. Now if you have an item marked worn weight and you have multiple of that item, it will only count the first item as worn and the rest will be counted as in your pack.
Use case here is if you have multiple pairs of socks in your pack, so you set the quantity of your Darn Tough socks to 3. Realistically you have one pair on your feel and the other two pairs in your pack. DFTS will now take this into account when you mark an items as work and quantity is greater then 1.

Additionally you can now export all your gear locker items to a CSV from the settings.

11 days later

This is one of my bigger releases to come out recently. Added a new feature that checks out what is in your pack and makes recommendations.

The recommendations start out simple, following the basic ten essentials. As you add items the pack checker will check on some more advanced rules to make sure you are not missing anything essential. For example:

  • If you pack a tent or tarp, but you do not have tent stakes you will get a warning to suggest adding tent stakes.

  • Staying out over night and dont have a sleeping pad, you will get a suggestion to pack one.

  • Going backpacking but dont have a potty trowel or wag bag? We will make sure you don't forget to pack one!

These are just a couple checks that we will do with over 20+ rules built out right now. If you think of any others that you think would be helpful, feel free to comment and I would love to discuss new ideas to help people prepare for their trips!

I hope this feature will help beginner hikers and backpackers and experts alike. I was surprised by some of the items I forgot in some of my bigger packs while I was testing this feature out!

Here are some screenshots:

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Additionally in this release I added the ability to export an individual pack as a CSV file as well. Release is live now for both Android and iOS!

2 months later

Late blog post here but I did get an update out right before Christmas that added better tablet support and limited web support, so you can log in and build you packs on the big screen ;-)

Check out the web app by visiting https://dfts.app/ and clicking the login button in the top right corner.

Hope you all had a wonderful holiday season! I heard from a lot of you over the holidays, seems like you were all dreaming of your next big trip in the new year! Keep packing, and I have some exciting updates coming now that I am back to coding!

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a month later

Back in October 2023, I released a fairly major update that allowed users to create sub packs for easily adding groups of items to a pack.

I have received a lot of great feedback on how users have loved that update, and how it has made creating packs easier and more efficient, but........ each user who loved it also wished they could mark all the items in a sub pack as "Packed" with one tap, instead of swiping each item individually.

Today, I am releasing some helpful updates to help make Sub packs even more useful! And one of those features is one tap packing all items in a particular sub pack!

This released was just pushed to both Android and iOS App stores and should be live in both stores in the next coming days.

When viewing a pack, there is now a new summary card added entitled, "Sub Pack Summary / Management"

This card will show you a list of each sub pack that has been added to your current pack along with that sub packs weights and a bar chart that shows what percentage of the total pack weight is from each sub pack:

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If you want to only view items in your list from a particular sub pack, you can tap the sub pack, and it will auto filter your list so that you only see that sub packs items:

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Lastly if you tap the "+" Icon next to the sub pack, it will mark all the items as packed with one tap! You no longer have to pack each item individually in sub packs if you do not want to. Once the items are marked packed, the "+" icon turns to a "-" and you can tap the "-" to un-pack all the items from that particular sub pack!

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a month later

I seem to have a saving issue. If I edit a piece of gear like the weight or if it's consumed or not, it will not be saved. It goes back to what it was before the edit.

    Both. Example. I change weight from lb to oz in gear locker and it will not save it. I change item to consumable in pack and it will not save.

      MLWRIGHT > MLWRIGHT I change weight from lb to oz in gear locker and it will not save it.

      I see this bug. I just fixed it and am uploading to the app stores now. Are you on iPhone of Android? Android should be live in a few hours. iOS usually takes 24-48 hours for approval in their app store.

      MLWRIGHT I change item to consumable in pack and it will not save.

      This is a bug that was identified the other day an actually an update went out last night/this morning that fixes this issue. Please go to your app store and make sur eyou are on the latest version. If interested you can read about that fix here:

      OK I did the update. Now have blank screen when I click on my pack. Screen shot attached of what shows. Image description

        MLWRIGHT Just had this one reported by a user on reddit a few hours ago as well. Update pending review. Sorry for the hectic start. Should be fixed shortly. I can reply here so yo get notified once I see them live.

        MLWRIGHT Update is now live on android. Just pending iOS. After updating idf still seeign this issue. Go to where you add gear in this pack and toggle on and off the worn weight items.

        Still had the problem. I deleted the last item I entered in the gear locker which is when I started having the problem. All is fixed and working now.

          15 days later

          MLWRIGHT I think this should finally be solved now. Hopefully you wont see it again :-)

          New update pushed out today! Live now on Android, and should be live on iOS in the next 24-48 hours. This has been an update I have personally been wanting for awhile now. I have a lot of packs and sub packs now, and wanted to clean up up my pack list..... So now you can archive packs!

          Archiving a pack removes it from your Pack List, but still keeps it available for other to view if its a public pack. You can also archive sub packs if you do not want them cluttering your main view, and you will still be able to add them to packs.

          To archive a pack just click the 3 dots in the upper right while viewing a pack, and select "Archive Pack"

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          Once a pack is archived, you can go to settings and there is an option to view all archived packs. You can edit packs straight from that list or you can tap the un-archive button to bring it back to your main list.

          Archiving packs is only available to pro subscribers since free users can only have 5 packs at this time.

          a month later

          Pushing to the app stores right now is our latest update! Should be live in Android App Store today and maybe even the apple app store (Apple has been getting quicker at reviews).

          Latest update adds summary cards to your Gear locker. This allows you to see basic stats about the items you own. It also allows you to filter your gear locker easily by Category, Item Type or Manufacturer by taping the bar graphs like you can already do with the pack summary cards.

          Hope you enjoy the update!

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          Another update going out tonight to the app stores for approval:

          Under the hood fixes mostly for our European friends or anyone not using pounds and ounces. There were some ever slightly small rounding errors when looking at total weight and summary cards for a pack. This update should fix those small rounding errors which add up with a lot of gear.

          25 days later

          Lately I have been working on a lot of code clean up and back end changes that you all will not really see but will have huge benefits for you all. Unfortunately while doing that I broke the community gear locker search for about 24 hours (Sorry about that). It is now fixed, so please update to the latest version to make sure you have that fix.

          Secondly the changes I made in the background was more for me to be able to more quickly conduct admin tasks. If you do not know I screen all the items before they go into the public gear locker, so that it doesn't get crazy with lots of duplicates etc. With the large influx of users lately, I have not been able to keep up with approving gear locker additions, new items are being added to quickly by you all (Thanks!).

          In the latest release I can now approve new additions to the community gear locker much quicker!

          14 days later

          Another small update pushed out today. Live in Android app store, waiting for the iOS review still.

          LAtest update adds onboarding to the app. When you first open the app there will be a few screens that give you a high level overview of how the app works. This is to help new users get acquainted with the app quicker.

          8 days later

          Adding user names! Apologies if you just went through the new onboarding screens, you will need to one more time to set your username ;-)

          User names at this time just show up under the pack description on public packs in the "Find Packs" section. This is just the beginning, lots more to come :-)

          Currently live on Android, Apple should be live sometime today!

          10 days later

          Last updates I added usernames, and this update starts to take advantage of them!

          Now when viewing a public pack from a user, you will see their username in the bottom left hand corner. You can now tap their username and go to their public user profile. The public user profile is very simple right now and shows a list of that users public packs!

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          Much more planned for the user profile in the future!

          4 months later

          I realized I didn't post the last update in here which I pushed out on 9/23/2024 which added gear notes! You can now add gear notes and filter items by searching gear notes as well:

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          Additionally today I pushed another small update that gives user feedback when swipping on a gear item in a pack to mark it as packed. Swipe right to pack and left to un-pack:

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          a month later

          Fun Christmas update, if you are a pro user who has uploaded images you can now create and share your own Gear Layouts of your pack! Here is mine from my Cactus to Clouds hike:

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          You can select the Gear Collage from the 3 dot menu while viewing any pack. It will create the collage on all items with an uploaded image.

          It initially create a randomized collage, but you can edit to your liking. Drag images to move them around, pinch and zoom to enlarge or shrink image and rotate them.

          I found pinch and zoom difficult on smaller images, so you can tap an image to bring up manual controls for fine tuning. Hope you all enjoy!

          Can’t wait to see what gear layouts that you all make from your adventures!