For a while, the phone app came in two versions, and a switch in the settings moved you from one to the other. There is only one now: the new one. It has four spaces, always the same at the bottom of the screen: Today, Dogs, Activity and Manage. The launcher opens on the decision of the moment: prepare today's session, resume an interrupted run, or head out for a free run.
What changes when you open the app
Today reads top to bottom, like a day. A sentence answers the morning question first ("2 dogs to look at before you go, then the session."). Below it: "Before you go" (the dogs that need something, or "All ready"), "The session" (its card, with "Start" inside), then "During the day" (the chores, and breeding if the kennel does it). No time of day is made up: the timeline sorts, it does not schedule. The season, the insurance reminder, recent outings and the trophies stay lower down.
The pack is recognised by its faces. A sentence leads ("21 dogs ready out of 24."). Then "To check": the dogs that need a look, each with a single word — resting, tired, to watch, in heat. Then "Ready", then "The others". Each dog has its photo, or its initials. The photos are kept on the phone: you see them without a network.
A ring around each photo gives today's form. Its number, from 0 to 100, sits at the bottom of the ring: green from 67, ochre from 34 to 66, red below. It comes from the same data as the "TSB" curve on the dog's page, in the "Training" section. A dog with no recorded session has no ring.
Kilometres or hours, your choice. At the top of the grid, "km | hours" picks what each face counts: the season's kilometres, or its hours ("12.5 h"), and the all-time total when no season is running. A dog dropped from the line on the way only counts what it ran, in time as in distance.
The Plan opens on the season in one line. "Week 3 of 12.", a bar cut into phases, and a "W3 · here" marker. The detailed week comes below, as before. With no plan, the screen says "No plan. You can still go out for a free run." and offers to start anyway.
Manage puts everything in order, one function per page. Each "Kennel" entry opens its own function: identity, focus, visibility, backup, measure freshness, deceased dogs, the hydration threshold, members, your weight, the version. Before, several entries opened the same long page, at the very top, without pointing at what you had picked. Rights have not moved: everyone reads, the owner edits, and offline the settings stay visible, greyed out.
What others see, and what they never see
Nothing new, and that is deliberate. The photos you see in the pack are the ones the kennel already has: the kennel's members see them, nobody else does. The copy kept on the phone is shared with no one and goes away with the app. The form rings are computed from the kennel's sessions: its members see the same ones. The "km | hours" choice is seen by no one: it stays on your phone, and another member of the kennel keeps their own. The visibility switches (public profile, public traces, leaderboard, public litters) are the same as before, gathered on a single page.
What the new app does not do
- It no longer has a whole "Settings" screen. Manage replaces it, function by function. This is not "not yet": a single page of everything that can be set is exactly what this layout undoes.
- The ring does not decide who goes. A resting dog can wear a green ring: it is fresh precisely because it is resting. The state word ("Resting", "Ready") says whether it goes, and that word takes into account rest, heat and the health signals the ring ignores.
- It does not make up hours. A session entered by hand without a duration counts its kilometres, not time: the hours counter can stay lower than the kilometres suggest.
- It has no tablet version. It is designed for a phone, held in one hand, sometimes with gloves on.
- It does not keep the old layout as a fallback. The switch went away with it.
The choices made against the obvious
"To check" comes before "Ready". The old pack ranked dogs from the most available to the least: you read top to bottom and stopped. That was handy for picking a team, bad for the morning, when the question is "who needs my attention?". We reversed the order, and kept the sentence on top for the count of ready dogs.
The distance says its period. The mock-up showed "42 km · 7 d". Nothing in the app computes a dog's last seven days; writing it would have meant inventing a figure. The screen says "42 km · season" when a season is running, and the total otherwise. Hours follow the same rule.
The ring surrounds the photo, it is not added next to it. We had first removed the ring from the pack, keeping only the state word. Three places were drawn to bring it back: around the face, as a badge next to the word, or only on the dog's page. The first one won: the form reads at a glance, on the dog itself, without one more line.
The "km | hours" choice belongs to the phone, not to the kennel. The musher who plans runs by time and the one who counts them in kilometres sometimes share a kennel: each keeps their own counter, and nothing is written to the database.
Photos are a kept file, not a database column. Adding a column and a migration for a thumbnail would have been out of proportion. Each dog has a small file on the phone, refreshed only when the photo changes. Offline, we show the one we have, even an old one, rather than nothing.
"Partner code" and "Battery" only appear where they are useful. On iPhone, the App Store forbids an app from unlocking access with its own code: the "Partner code" entry only shows there when an offer is running. "Battery" exists only on Android, the only system that can cut the recording.