Crag Dog 1.0 into the iPhone App Store
My second rock climbing-based iPhone app has just landed in the iPhone App Store. Crag Dog is a rock climbing grade converter, very useful for those times when, as I say on the website, “you’re climbing in another country and you just want to know if that ‘VIsup/VI+’ route is going to kick your ass or rock your world.”
Crag Dog converts between nine different rock climbing grade systems (including some obscure ones I hope you get to encounter some day) and three bouldering grade systems.
All for just a buck.
Another Grade Converter?
If you’re a climber with an iPhone you’ve probably already looked for a grade converter. You might even already have one.
Sure there are a couple other grade converters in the app store already and when I was in France over the summer I tried them all but, alas, found them all to be uniformly bland in operation and aesthetically unpleasing – with the exception of Climb Converter, which is visually very interesting and unique, but not particularly good from a usability perspective.
So I built another one.
I think my biggest peeve with all the others is that every single one of them implements the conversion using UIPickerView which, to be honest, is exactly how I would have done it myself the first time around had I not tried out theirs first. And the UIPickerView (the wheely-spinner bit) works just great for Apple’s Clock application but for a grade converter it’s pretty limited in the useful data it can show. And it’s slow to use.
Instead I chose to use UIScrollView instances which allows me to display much more data onscreen at once and also makes using the app itself easier, faster, smoother and more frictionless. Want to switch grades? Flick with your finger. Want to view grade conversions? Flick a finger. I just like it better.
So if you’re a rock climber and you own an iPhone and you fancy climbing anywhere else in the world, or just want to know what the local grades of Adam Ondra’s epic sends on Youtube are, grab yourself a copy of Crag Dog and enjoy.
Oh, and if you do buy it please be sure to rate and review it in the app store. It does make a difference.