Hi Everyone, I'm not a big forum guy anymore, but I wanted to share something I have been working on very hard with you all. (I know I still owe some people a present in the mail from the big 4. I'll get that stuff out the door as soon as I can, I swear) Last year I got laid off from my 9-5 job. Rather than just crossing my fingers and hoping I'd find another great job, I balanced my search with work on several of my own projects that I never had time for when I worked 9-5 and taught in my off hours. A few of those are carp related, of course. David Moore, who owns Big Carp Tackle approached me to team up with him, using my design skills on a fishing app he was interested in building. We spent over 6 months on it, and I can confidently say it's awesome, and there is nothing else like it on the market. I'm stoked to finally let the cat out of the bag. I just wrote a long winded post about it on TFF that I'll paste below: The app is called "Big Carp" but it's really for any type of fishing. Basically it's a visual logging and data management tool. You can record your sessions and save all kinds of data points in a timeline to refer back to later. Sort sessions but venue, total weight, total fish caught, date, etc. Add photos, catches and notes to your session timelines. I read a thread on this forum about navionics before. I love that app. It's probably my favorite for fishing other than the one I designed; I use a few others too. You can save screen shots from other apps and use them all in one place in Big Carp. When I first show up to the water, I open big carp, start a new session and add a a note about the conditions and other observations to my session timeline, then a few screenshots from other apps. -Usually a screenshot of my location from navionics, a screenshot of a solunar table from the"fishing calendar" app, and a screenshot of several water data charts from the USGS web site like temperature, tide, dissolved O2, and turbidity. Weather conditions like wind speed and direction, cloud cover and barometric pressure are added to your timeline automatically at the start of a new session, hourly if you have the app open, and after each fish you add. I used to have a hard time deciding if any of this stuff really mattered in my sessions. Temperature is an easy one to track, and tide isn't bad, but the rest was just too much of a pain to write down and manage, especially when you start to cross reference them and factor in time of year. Now I can look back to old sessions where I did well or not and glean useable information pretty easily. You can also add listings for your own gear with photos and notes and apply those listings to session timelines so you remember what you used that time, and you can also apply gear to fish you catch. There's default gear groups like rods and bait, but you can add anything you want from big stuff like boats and RV's down to hooks and weights if you are into it. You can use the gear section for tackle management all kinds of ways. For example, David added the date when he last changed the line on his reels, so he knows old it is. You can view all of your fish in one list as well, and sort them all kinds of ways, like by species, size, and whether or not you labeled them a trophy. So, you can add all of your favorite old catches and find them quickly to show them off. Previously I always looked mine up on facebook, but that was slow and irritating. When you enter a fish you can add your rod, rig, You can actually create a whole gallery of photos for one fish if you want. I fish for carp most of the time (although I really am a solid multi-species guy and run a multi-species club) and it's pretty awesome to be able to have a photo for each side of a mirror carp saved in one single listing. There's a lot of fish I catch that I want a few photos of handy too, like the 45 lb striper I caught last year, and the 50+ grass carp I caught my last time in Austin. Anyway, there is a lot more to it than that, but I've written enough. If you want to see more screenshots or for me to describe more features here, just ask. Here's a link to see and read a little more: http://bigcarpusa.com/app/ http://bigcarpusa.com/app/ Here is a link to an unedited screenshot video of me testing an early beta version: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10150846765514147
The final version has better tuned graphics and more features, but I haven't had a chance to make a video.
