The person who walked it beats the forecast

Shipped the week of August 24.

A forecast is a guess about a hillside nobody has stood on. Somebody who walked it this morning knows better. This week taught TrailsIQ to prefer the person.

Trail inspections

A trail inspection is five taps on a phone. What is the tread like, how wet is it, is anything in the way, are the drains running, is it usable right now. One question per screen, photographs where they help, and it files with no signal.

What makes it worth doing is where the answer goes. A recent walk outranks the forecast in the trail-conditions engine, per trail. If the model thinks your ground is soaked and somebody was on it this morning saying it is firm, the recommendation follows the person — and it names the walk it was built on, so the reader can see why it said what it said.

That trust fades rather than expiring. A reading counts fully on the day and less each day after, so a recommendation never flips overnight for no reason you can point at. A wetter-than-forecast reading is believed for longer than a drier one, because being wrong in those two directions does not cost the same thing.

An Overview you can plan a week from

The dashboard was a list of numbers. It is now a page you open on a Monday morning to work out what the week looks like:

• At-a-glance tiles — open tasks, structures in poor condition, the month's spend, trails currently closed
• Breakdown charts where the bars are buttons: click one and you land on the list it counted, already filtered
• Trail Health grouped by network, each row leading with the trail's own difficulty icon
• Status pills that open the screen that changes them, rather than just telling you

The same at-a-glance tiles are available on the phone.

Work hours for the whole crew

A work party is one session and several people. You can now log it that way — one entry, everybody who worked it named on it — instead of filing the same afternoon six times.

The Work report also gained a proper date-range picker — the same one, on every report that takes a range.

Also this week

Checklist lines can be scoped to chosen trails. A sweep item that only applies to three trails no longer appears against the other forty.

Sharper rainfall numbers. Every trail-conditions reading now comes from public government forecast data, with per-day rainfall resolved a day at a time rather than smeared across the window. The wetter the ground gets, the more that precision is worth.

Tax on documents that leave your organization, and currency and tax settings gathered under one Money heading.

Discussions moved to the bottom bar of the field app, which is where people kept looking for them.

A color-contrast pass across both the dashboard and the phone, measured against the accessibility standard rather than judged by eye. These screens get read in direct sunlight, in gloves, at the end of a long day.