UPDATE: Where U Ride At Now has it’s own website. For up to date info please visit http://www.whereurideat.com. You can also stay up to date on the progress of the app by following it on Twitter: whereurideat!
Where U Ride At is designed to help users share and find good places to ride atvs or other off-road vehicles.
Upon first launch of the app, you will be greeted with a login screen. If you do not have a valid login you will need to create a new account. Once your account is created, you will be logged in automatically. you will see a map with your current location in the center denoted by a green pin. The map will span approximately a 200 mile radius of your current location. You can quickly move to another place on the map by typing and address in the box at the top of the screen and pressing “Go.” While viewing the map, places to ride will be denoted by yellow diamond with an atv in the center. Touching a place will reveal it’s title along with a button link to view the place’s details.
The Detail View will include the description of the place written by the user who submitted the place. At the bottom of the screen there is a button to get directions to the place from your current location. If you are viewing a place that was added by you, there will be a trash icon in the navigation bar at the top of the screen. Touching this icon will remove the place from the map.
If you would like to add your current location to the map as a place for others to visit, touch the “+” button on the navigation bar above the map to the right of the title. Here you can fill in a Title and Description for the place and submit it along with the GPS coordinates which will be automatically included.
We like your ATV app but it has a few bugs, the most noticable being that whenever you try and enter a new riding location you are typing blind on the entire bottom half of the screen (including the GPS coordinates) because the keyboard covers the area where your typing and the screen where the text appears is not scrolling up to remain above the keyboard as you type nor can you make it. It also inserts random characters such as / sometimes when you use special characters such as the ‘ in don’t. After its submitted when you go back and look the word don’t has a / both in front of and after it, the character ” as used to say “rally at the gap” does the same thing.
There also needs to be a way of correcting or updating a riding area without having to completly delete it and re-enter everything from scratch. If you entered a riding area you can go back to the description and change the text, but there is no way to save it, the only two buttons are BACK and DIRECTIONS neither of which save any updates you made. We would also love to see the ability to drag the map to anyplace on the map and zoom in and then touch a location for it to pull up that location instead of having to enter the GPS coordinates, for one thing most people nowdays seem to use a different format for their GPS coordinates and translating to the older format shown in the app is sometimes difficult and even though I have a progam that does the conversion I have noticed it sometimes ends up just a little off, and of course some people don’t even know any coordinates so would like the option to find a place using the map or the ability to enter a physical address (or both). Not everyone is at a riding location at the time they want to enter it so just tapping the + doesn’t always help.
We really think it’s a great app and has been a long time coming. I live up in Batesville and we host free rides here all the time so I get a lot of contact with other riders. Everyone I have suggested it to so far who has said they went and got it and we have later talked about it thinks its a great start but would love to see some more options and we’re all hoping that your reading the comments your getting in the app store and will like some of the suggestions for future updates. One feature that has a lot of people in the Ouachita National Forrest worried (who are currently in a battle with the forrest service to keep their trails open) is if you will provide some kind of way within the app to report any illegal or innapropriate riding areas that some people may enter either because they didn’t realize it was illegal to ride at the location or because they just don’t care.
~ Thanks in Advance
Thank you so much for the constructive criticism! Yes, I am seeing all the comments and suggestions and working to prioritize them into releases. The first update, which I’m working on right now, will include a rating system so that other users can rate places you add to the map. The issue you addressed with the inputs being hidden behind the keyboard will be fixed as well. The ability to drag the map and zoom in and out should already be in the app now. The search box at the top of the screen is just a convenience if you wanted to jump from one side of the country to another and it will accept city names, street addresses etc. Let me know if you can confirm this is not working and if not, please let me know what hardware you’re using (3g,3gs,4). I hope to have the next update in for review by the weekend.
We really like your program and I’ve tried to support you from the start, I tell people about it on the trails sometimes, but so many of them email me later or tell me the next time I see them that they coldn’t remember the name. Have you considered changing the name to something more easy to remember? Everyone thinks the name is somewhat, umm, well just not really easy to remember and doesn’t stand out in searches of the app store as being specifically for ATV’s. Some even say after they got it that if they have a lot of apps on their phone it gets “lost” because the name doesn’t say ATV so when they go to look for it later out of 12 pages full of apps or dozens of subfolders full of apps on the iPhone4 it just doesn’t stand out as being for ATVs. Many people I’ve talked to say they thought it would be much more applicable if it were renamed to “ATV Trails” or if your attatched to the Where you Ride at name then how about adding ATV Trails in front of it like “ATV Trails: Where you Ride At” but make the main tag ATV Trails, maybe leave the Where you Ride at part as a subtitle kinda thing the way some programs have.
That seems to be the #1 complaint or suggestion that I hear from people when I tell them about it both before and after they get it. Most seems to have that one complaint above any others, they just don’t like the name because it doesnt mention ATV’s or Trails and where you ride at could mean anything from a motorcycle to a mountain bike to a unicycle as one guy put it, it just doesnt tell people that it’s for ATV Trails. On your iPhone after its installed the name gets shortend to “Wher…de At” and they don’t even like the looks of that on their iPhone screens. ATV Trails would be more to the point about what the app is for, isn’t taken, and would show up properly on the iPhones screen.
We just had a great ride this weekend at Moccasin Gap with a bunch of great people from all over Arkansas and we were talking about it during one of the stops and I noticed that the ones who had it liked the program, disliked the name, and others who didn’t have it said they’ve never found it or if they did see it while seatching the app store didn’t “get” what it was from the title so must have passed it by.
Thought I should share, maybe it would help more people find it, or at least realize what it was, if you considered a name change or alteration.
I know the app store lets authors change the name of their programs because I have other apps that suddenly changed name with an update, usually explained as being so people could find it easier or that the new name was more accurately descriptive of what the app did. Like “Weather Date” recenly got renamed “Weather Alert” which makes a LOT more sense for what the app does, and “Gas Buddy” recently got renamed to “Fuel Price Finder”, which I noticed inside the app it still says Gas Buddy only now it says Gas Buddy Fuel Price Finder, but its that external name that helps people find it and know what it’s for and why I thought maybe ATV Trails: Where you Ride at would work if your attatched to the where you ride at name. Just have the ATV Trails as the external name shown on the icon and the app store can show the whole name, it would definatally tell people what its really for.
Anyway, keep up the good work.
As always, thanks for being the one user who, instead of just complaining about problems, becomes part of the solution. That is probably the #1 complaint I’ve heard as well. I guess it’s my own fault for not putting more thought into the name when I initially released the app. That being said, I hate to just throw away the branding of “Where U Ride At” because it’s been almost a year in the making now. I agree with you, that the most reasonable change is making it ATV Trails: Where U Ride At. I also agree with making the “Bundle Display Name” (The name that shows up on the phone under the icon) “ATV Trails” so that it doesn’t wrap like “Wher…de At.” I submitted an update this morning with those changes, so as long as apple doesn’t have a problem with it, you should see that roll out sometime this week. I’ll post the official notice of the update on the whereurideat website after it’s approved. That address is http://www.whereurideat.com