The Scottish Mountaineering Club (SMC) and Rockfax are pleased to announce a joint project to create mobile app-based guides from the SMC's existing print guides. To celebrate the beginning of this collaboration, a package covering the popular Northern Corries in the Cairngorms has been released on the Rockfax app - Cairn Gorm - Cairn Lochan and Cairn Gorm - Stob Coire an t-Sneachda. There is also a free example package covering Polney Crag (Craig a Barns).
Rockfax Director Alan James said, "This was too good an opportunity to miss. The SMC were keen for an app, and we had no coverage for Scotland. Over the last few months we have been able to put together an arrangement that benefits both parties and climbers in general. The Northern Corries are a good start but they are just the beginning of this huge task which is likely to take several years. The aim will be to work through the SMC guidebooks producing the app guides as we go. I would especially like to thank Rob Lovell for being the driving force behind this link up."
Simon Richardson, SMC President, said, "The Scottish Mountaineering Club has been documenting climbing in Scotland for over a century, and we are delighted to be embracing digital technology in partnership with Rockfax. The Northern Corries app represents a significant step forward into the world of digital media for the Club and will complement our ongoing guidebook print programme."
To find the packages, check Crags > Downloads > The Cairngorms on the Rockfax app. The free sample of Polney Crag is under Highland Outcrops South.
The Rockfax app has been available on iOS since October 2015 and has been a great success, with it now being installed on over 16,000 mobile devices. It has been updated 18 times with many significant improvements since the original version. The Android version is nearing completion and we hope to have that released later this year. More about the Rockfax app.
Comments
It's fortunate most climbers use iPhones.....
For the last almost 3 years half of phone users have been unable to use mobile Rockfax!
https://www.statista.com/statistics/262179/market-share-held-by-mobile-operating-systems-in-the-united-kingdom/
I hope the SMC made it a condition of providing their data to Rockfax that an equally supported Android version was made available.
That reads like you believe Rockfax are deliberately sitting on a fully functional Android App as part of some Pro-Apple conspiracy. I'm pretty sure that if they could 'make an Andoird version available', they would do so.
That said, I do wonder if it's sensible to commit to, and widely advertise, a co-venture with the SMC when their development resources are clearly limited, but then I'm not privy to their development practices.
Excuse my techno-ignorance, but does one need a phone signal to use this? Is it possible to print off topos and so on at home?
Agreed, however I've always wondered why they developed it specifically for iPhone, when there are numerous frameworks / libraries out there that allow you to write code once and then simply deploy versions for iPhone, Android, PC or Mac (even in-browser in some cases).
I've always found it actually easier to do it that way anyway 'cos I can do the bulk of the development, testing and debugging on my laptop without having to faff about getting it onto a device and setting up a remote debugger etc. every five minutes.* Much simpler. It also massively reduces maintenance overhead and costs as there's only one code-base.
Phil
*You obviously need to run full and thorough tests on each platform at the end of the process for anything you're planning to ship.