Dont Forget The Spoon - Hiking

Let me start out by saying I love this app. It is ver user friendly and easy to use. My fiancé and I recently used this app to help prepare for a backpacking trip. It was awesome being able to have an easy visual for the weight we would have/save by swapping or adjusting gear. It made planning a breeze. Then, when we packed our gear, the checklist or “packed” feature was super helpful in making sure we had all of our gear packed and ready. There are a few small issues, mainly the tendency the app has to swap pounds and ounces. This has led to a couple of surprisingly heavy packs, but it’s an easy fix. The other issue is sometimes the updates you make to an item don’t save. Overall though, I love the app, and am excited to keep using it. I highly recommend it!

There’s a lot of potential here, but being able to add metadata to gear items is sorely missing. Being able to add a custom line/property to a gear item (such as insulation R value, or rope tension rating, or purchase date, or down fill weight, or number of carabiners of this type, or clothing size, or many other essential properties) is not yet possible. Being able to add a custom “Pack Category” is currently possible, but u can’t customize the properties available to that category (which is currently very limited and universal for all items). You cannot add a /Sleeping Pad/ category that includes the properties of (R value, length, width, thickness, or anything else you might need to reference when planning a trip) in addition to weight. This is an essential and missing feature (I have the Pro version). The “lighter options available” suggestion provided by the app, is also not useful, as every item of gear is unique in what application it best serves, and that judgement can only be made by the user and the intended application to have value. Somebody soon is going to get this type of app right (in terms of features) and they will win the day. (There’s also bugs)

Found this app via Reddit and the developer had some great discussion/feedback, so I thought I would download it and try it out. So far, everything has been really user-friendly, though my understanding is one can’t get import previously existing lists. Thankfully I didn’t have one so having to create a list was a useful exercise for me, not redundant. While setting up my gear and pack, I discovered it could do everything I would want it to do, generally via a menu I hadn’t looked at yet. My two thoughts for feedback thus far are: 1) an option to separate essential weight from base weight - I like to see what my bare essentials weigh (Eg pack, shelter, sleeping) separate from my total base weight (including accessories, clothing, electronics, etc) 2) when looking at the pack weight summary, it looks like some items are being filtered by names other than the Pack Category. For example, if I go to “Pack,” the items under “Pack” lists items like my “PackIt Gourmet Food; if I misspell PackIt then it gets excluded, making me thing it’s searching for items that say Pack, instead of items that are in the Pack Category “Pack.” Just makes things more cluttered visually, or worse, is double counting the weight. Excellent app otherwise!!!