Laying and searching a track

This is the app's core loop: you walk a track, your dog works it later, and afterwards you look at both together.

Laying a track

1. Tap Lay Track on the home screen — or, at the bottom of the track list, Record Track or Record from design if you want to follow a shape you planned.
2. If you have several dogs, pick one.
3. Choose the terrain — several types at once are fine, plus a free note.
4. Set name & aging time: the name is optional, and the aging time can be picked from presets, typed in, or left out.
5. Wait for GPS, then walk. The map follows your position and recording continues as a foreground service, so you can pocket the phone.
6. As you go, mark articles and angles (see below). A mis-tap can be taken back with Undo.
7. Tap Stop at the end.

A tap on Stop asks first, to be safe — "Stop recording?". If your hands are full you can skip that question: press and hold Stop. A bar fills as you hold, and at the end the recording stops straight away; release early and nothing happens. This works on the recording and the search screen. Nothing on the button says so — and it is the quickest way to stop when the dog is pulling on the line.

KynoPlan fetches the weather once when recording starts; you can edit it by hand later. The way in is to tap the weather bar — nothing on screen says so. It is tappable everywhere it appears: while recording, while searching, and on the track summary. The editor lets you correct every value by hand — temperature, feels-like, wind, wind direction, humidity, conditions, rain — or fetch the weather again, and for that you choose the location and the time. On the summary both are preset sensibly, the time to the start of the track. That is exactly what the time is for: you fetch the weather that actually applied when the track was laid, rather than the weather right now — which matters when you tidy a track up in the evening.

Marking articles and angles

The difference matters:

• Articles are best marked live, as you drop them. The app cannot detect them for you.
• Angles give you three options: mark them live, let the app detect them during recording (Settings → Search & Tracking → Live angle detection), or run Detect Events on the finished track afterwards from the track summary.

Laying gives you five buttons: Token, Sharp L, Sharp R, Left 90° and Right 90°. Curves and obtuse turns belong to planning, not to the recording screen.

The two detection routes behave differently. Live detection places the mark straight away and you confirm it with a tick — unconfirmed, it lapses. Detection after the fact places nothing by itself; it proposes what it found and you accept or skip each one.

Letting the dog search

1. Tap Search Track on the home screen and pick the track you laid.
2. The map shows the laid track and the current position.
3. Once the search is running you don't need the screen — pocket the phone. Articles found, deviations and notes can all be added later from the summary.
4. From your wrist or the screen: Item Found when the dog has picked up an article, and Mark problem for a deviation or a missed article.
5. Stop ends the search and opens the summary.

There are six problem buttons: Deviation, Missed Item, False Item, Distracted, Lost Track and Handler Error. Marking a problem also files a comment on the track. Unlike laying, a search also lets you record notes — typed or dictated — and take the last marker back.

As the dog nears an article or a turn, a coloured alert banner appears at the top. Leash length and alert margin can be adjusted for the individual run.

While a search is running the app blocks you from leaving the screen and says so: "Stop the search before leaving this screen." If the search path is shorter than three metres, it asks whether to save or discard it. Each track holds exactly one search — searching the same track again replaces the previous run.

Searching without a recording

At the bottom of the track list you'll find Search without recording. There is no laid track as a reference — useful at a trial, on a track someone else laid, or when the recording failed. Angle and leg counts are then derived from automatic detection of the search path, and the app says so.

The track summary

This is where everything about one track comes together, in tabs: Map, Laid, Search, Events, Evaluations, Comments and Similar. On the map, the layer chips at the top left show or hide individual layers — long-press one to change its colour. Which chips appear depends on what the track contains: the laid path, the search path, a design overlay, cross tracks.

The Search tab collects the run's figures — among them Accuracy, Found, Problems, Aged, Turns and Legs. Accuracy is a number from 0 to 100 and says what share of the search points fell within tolerance of the laid track — it is not a mean deviation in metres. Whether that tolerance is derived from GPS accuracy or fixed is set under Settings → Search & Tracking. It is computed after the search, not during it.

Similar is not a laid-versus-searched comparison: it ranks the dog's other tracks by resemblance across terrain, length, articles, turns, age and temperature.

On the map tab you can also replay the search run. The share icon exports the track in several formats; More holds far more than its name suggests: rename, move to another dog and delete are only the start — the situational entries are listed below. Several tracks from the same outing can also be grouped into a training session.

Six entries in the More menu are worth knowing about, because their labels give no hint of the occasion for using them:

• Follow me walks a recorded track on foot with a live, centred map — your position stays in the middle as a heading arrow and the map turns the way you face. Handy for finding dropped articles on a track you had to abandon. Nothing is recorded.
• Trim track… exists for the commonest recording mistake: you recorded past the end, or started on the way to the starting point. Set the marker with a slider and choose Delete before or Delete after; if the track has been searched as well, you first pick whether to trim Recorded or Searched. Length, duration and counts update, and you confirm first.
• Convert to search… rescues a run where you tapped Lay Track when you meant Search Track. Either the path stays here and becomes the search side of this track — the recorded layer resets to zero, while weather, terrain and comments stay — or it moves onto an existing recording as its search side, in which case the current track is deleted along with its details. The confirmation spells out which. The entry is hidden if the track already has a search on it.
• Save as Design turns the track you walked into a reusable shape — the route to laying the same track again at the same spot later. The conversion is lossy, though: only the angles and step counts carry over, so the shape can differ noticeably from where you actually walked. In exchange, you can edit it afterwards in the editor.
• Save as GPS reference is the answer to that: it stores a faithful copy of the path you walked as a design, point for point, marked in the design list with a small GPS chip. Use it when the real course is what matters — complex curves, for instance — and Save as Design when you want to reshape it afterwards.
• Simplify… reduces the number of GPS points while preserving the shape of the path. You need it mainly when sharing a track by QR code — the preview tells you whether it still fits into one code — and to take noise out before running turn detection. Start, end, articles and turns are never removed.

What on the map is tappable

The summary map holds more than it lets on. Four things respond to a tap with nothing on screen to say so — and because nobody goes looking for them, they are usually found by accident.

• The search path. Tap the line your dog walked and the app asks "What happened here?". The options are Item found and the same six problems as live: Deviation, Missed Item, False Item, Distracted, Lost Track, Handler Error. The marker drops onto the search path where you tapped, and a problem files the same comment a live marker would. This is how you add afterwards what you could not mark during the search — which is the normal case when the phone was in your pocket. You need to tap within about ten metres of the line; if the laid track and the search path are shown at once, the app asks which layer you mean first.
• The laid track. Tapping the recorded path offers "Add token here?" and drops an article marker there — for the article you forgot to mark while laying. It is placed at the right point in the track's sequence, so a search reaches it and can register it as found. Note that this also changes the denominator of Found on the Search tab.
• A marker itself. Tap an existing event marker and the app asks whether to remove it from the track permanently; if several sit close together you pick which one first. For an article the Delete button stays locked for five seconds — deliberately, because deleting cannot be undone. The start and end pins are protected and cannot be deleted, even if you tap right on them.
• The scale bar at the bottom left. Tapping it sets the step length used to convert metres into step counts — and steps are the unit tracking work is actually planned in. On the summary the value applies to this one track, survives a restart, and travels along in backups and .dttrack files; a button puts it back to the default. On the recording, search and design screens you can additionally tick that the new value becomes your default in Settings.