Inspiration & Goal
For my first app project in Advanced Mobile App Development, I want to create an app that helps backpackers keep track of their backpacking gear and easily calculate the weight of their gear. The inspiration for this app came to me because I am planning on hiking the Pacific Crest Trail after graduating in a few months, and my fiancée and I have been finalizing our gear lists. It is really handy to have a tool that quickly lets you add up and categorize your gear, to see if your pack weight meets your goals or needs to be cut down more, and I want to create this tool for the mobile platform.
My goal is to create an app that serves as a convenient, always-accessible repository for keeping track of your gear lists and adding up your weight totals. Ideally, you would be able to update these lists as your gear changes. Additionally, users will be able to categorize items in their lists to see which groups should be cut down and organize their lists in a way that makes sense.
Audience
My audience for this app would primarily be ultralight or lightweight backpackers, although other types of weight-conscious outdoor recreationists (such as climbers, ski mountaineers, hikers, bikers, etc.) could also make use of the app to organize, categorize, and evaluate their gear.
Research and Precedents
I couldn’t find any other apps similar to mine on the iOS App Store, which I partially attribute to the fact that backpacking weight calculators are somewhat of a niche application. Since I will be mostly using table views and basic calculations to create my app, I think that my project will be feasible and realistic for our timeframe, but also challenging to execute well in terms of user design and making everything intuitive.
On the web, there are a few different softwares for calculating backpacking gear weights. One such software is LighterPack, which has many features that I will try to replicate in my app (for example, cross-unit calculations and categorization). Many people seem find this website useful, especially users of the r/ultralight Reddit community.
Content
Most of the content in this app will be user generated. Since I won’t be interfacing with an API, users will simply add in their items and determine the weight for each item from the manufacturer website or some other source. However, I want users to be able to add the weight of each item in any unit (ounces, grams, or pounds). Therefore, I will need to include a few simple calculations to convert between these units for the totals, which shouldn’t be too hard to find.
Paper Prototype
Below, you can see some pictures of my first prototype for this project. When the user first installs the app, they won’t have any items in their gear list, but these can be added by clicking the “+” icon in the top right. Then, users can use pickers, keyboards and switches to enter in information about the item before saving it to the list. Back on the “Items” list, items will be organized by category and sorted within categories by weight.
After adding a few items, the user can switch over to the “Totals” tab of the app, which will show the user the weights for each category, and total weight for their entire gear list. At any point, the user can edit an item’s information by clicking on it in the “Items” list and changing whatever information is desired.
nate bennett 