product review

[tony@CIC]

Golf season...

 

one of the older lads said "Its Thursday. You can be at the office, at home with your wife, or playing golf. We play golf all year"

 

Words to live by

Those are some wise words

 

 

Sent from my iPad using MyGolfSpy

[Myardage]

We play golf all year in Canada.

Does that count for anything?

And man oh man, does the ball ever go nowhere in the cold at sea level...

I really wish I had an app for that...lol

[AH1980MN]

The app sounds good, but sour grapes won't get a lot of traction... I would bump periodically, make sure folks know this is a free review item, and possibly get in touch with the mods. Patience- everyone- especially MGS central has a lot on their plates these days. And good luck- if you're still looking for testers, and if I'm able, maybe I'd have a go in April or May when the courses open.

[Myardage]

Thank-you. Understand and appreciate what you are saying.

Cheers !

[STUDque]

OK so I'll give my first impressions on your app. I read the description and watched some of the video. You may not like what I'm about to say so feel free to take it with a grain of salt or ignore it entirely......

 

 

1) It appears to require a TON of user input

Users shouldn't be telling the app how far they hit a 7 iron, the app should determine that for the player based on history. Gathering all of the weather data would be tedious and probably inaccurate as conditions change. That part should link to a weather service. Does the app even give GPS distances? Forgive me if it does but it wasn't readily apparent to me.

 

2) It's expensive for an app

I get that developing apps is expensive, but $20 is reaaaally expensive in the app store. Most people are willing to plunk down $5 or so on an impulse but much more than that will require more thought.

 

3) The UI looks dated

This is just my personal preference, but the User Interface seems like something out of an 80's episode of Doctor Who. It's got an industrial feel and doesn't draw me in.

 

4) You need a better marketing video.

As puttingpirate said, a 6 minute tutorial is not the way to market your product. You gotta tell us in 30 seconds or less why we should care about your app. Even that may be a little long. 30 seconds into the video you posted, we were still learning how to open the app.

 

5) I'm pretty sure this isn't USGA legal

Not 100% on this but I'm fairly certain you can't use devices that take elemental conditions into account. This would relegate your app to fun rounds and who really cares if the distance is 112.2 or 113.7 if they're throwing back brewskis with their bros and listening to music?

 

 

 

Conclusion

To me, it seems like a formula hidden under an app. Probably a well thought out formula, but not thinking for itself. We golfers need our apps to tell us what to do since there's no caddie out there taking these measurements for us. The most practical application I see for this is rolling the formula into an existing GPS app that links to weather data (or building a complete package around it).

 

 

 

..... Sorry for not being nice, but that's just my two cents

 

 

 

 

Sent from carrier pigeon using MyGolfSpy

[Myardage]

We appreciate any and all input, regardless of what that input may be. Constructive criticism is what allows us to continually improve the application, since it's impossible to tell which way we should be heading without feedback from our users (paying or potential).

 

That being said, thank you for your reply. We're still somewhat new to the whole mobile development thing, so any sort of written impression is extremely valuable to us.

 

I would like to reply to the points you've brought up:

 

1) We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how best to minimize the amount of user input required. Eventually we had to make a decision to try and balance the amount of information required from the user versus the ultimate flexibility of the application.

 

Myardage is essentially a distance calculator for figuring out how far your ball will fly between two different environments. Unfortunately this requires the user to enter in their carry distances, as well as the environmental conditions that those distances are valid under. This is because a 2 iron going 180 yards on a warm summer day will require a club head speed significantly slower than a 2 iron going 180 yards on a cold winter day. If we don't know that information, then we can't calculate the distance that club will travel under a new set of environmental conditions, because it's impossible to determine how much energy was imparted into the golf ball at launch based solely on a carry distance without knowing the atmospheric density (aka "rho" or ρ) that allowed the ball to travel that far in the first place.

 

2) Part of the reason why we picked that price was because we wanted to differentiate ourselves from the $0.99-$1.99 apps that have saturated the app store.

 

There's a lot of heavy technical math going on behind the scenes inside Myardage. It's not just a simple set of formulas- you wouldn't be able to recreate our results in an Excel spreadsheet, for example. Our application performs hundreds (if not thousands) of calculations to optimize a certain set of internal variables for each club entered. This requires a fair amount of CPU power to figure out, though these values can be cached and reused at a later date to accelerate subsequent calculations (unless the carry distance or previous conditions are modified).

 

The internal complexity of our application (which probably isn't apparent from the UI) is what drove us to set the price at $19.99 USD. We don't consider our application to be an "app", but rather a professional tool much like a laser range finder or a GPS watch. It's an investment in your game, like any other tool you might be carrying in your golf bag.

 

3) Myardage actually has a pretty lengthy development history behind it...

 

We started working on this project sometime around 2011, back when iOS 5 was still prevalent. Originally our graphics were designed to fit in with the iOS 5/6 system aesthetics. We did have a few builds that featured a flatter and less graphical user interface, but our beta testers often remarked about how they liked the LCD-style "industrial" look more because it made the application appear more like a professional tool than a cheap application. Around the same time we noticed that a lot of people would often want to know what the app was when catching a glance of it from another phone, so we decided to keep the old-school LCD style graphics and see how that went over.

 

4) My own personal experience is mostly limited to programming and static graphics, so marketing videos are kinda outside my realm of knowledge ATM. This is something we're looking into getting done ASAP, along with a new expanded website.

 

5) AFAIK, it's not legal to use during play, but there's no reason why a professional tour caddy couldn't use the application prior to play and write down the generated numbers in a notebook. Normally our application tries to pull down the latest weather conditions from the internet for you so you always know exactly how far your clubs are going to travel at any given time (this requires no interaction from the user and happens 100% automatically), however you can easily override those conditions to whatever you want, whenever you want. This can be used to "predict" how far your clubs will go under a set of conditions that may or may not exist at that exact moment. If the weather forecast is calling for a nice warm day, then you can just enter that into Myardage and get your numbers for that set of conditions.

 

Re GPS and inclusion into other apps:

 

While our core technology could be integrated into a full fledged GPS app, we wanted to initially release our application as a standalone tool that could be paired with any other equipment that gives you the current distance to the hole. For example, if you're using a laser range finder or a GPS watch that says you've got 190 yards to the hole, then you'd just look for the club that says ~190 yards in Myardage and use that (whether that be a wood, hybrid, or iron).

 

By integrating our technology into a full fledged GPS app, that flexibility is ultimately lost and the user is forced to use a single application, regardless of what existing equipment they may own. Likewise, you'd probably lose the straightforward ability to override the conditions and determine your distances for a future set of weather conditions, which is how we expect most professional tour caddies will want to use our app (since, as you mentioned, devices that take environmental conditions into consideration are prohibited during play).

[Myardage]

As per a prior recommendation in this thread, we've created a new post for our app over here:

 

https://forum.mygolfspy.com/topic/22307-myardage-for-ios-see-how-the-weather-and-altitude-affects-your-golf-shots/