Cam IncollWhen we first shipped Field Walker and Contour Walker, they opened as a separate panel with their own small map. It worked, but it always felt like a compromise: you already had a beautifully georeferenced aerial of your property on the screen, and we were asking you to look at a miniature of it instead.
Fieldwalker 1.1 fixes that. The field tools now run directly on your property map. Nothing slides up over it. The map you planned on at your desk is the map that follows you across the paddock.
What changes when the map follows you
Open Menu → Field walk and your full map becomes the live view. Your position appears as a teal dot with an accuracy ring and, once the compass is on, a cone showing which way you're facing. Every pin you've ever placed is already there, because they were always on this map. The contours, the boundary, the design elements you've drawn: all of it is under your feet, at full size, on the screen in your hand.
Across the top sits a slim strip with the things a map can't tell you on its own: how accurate your GPS fix is right now, your elevation, your heading, and which pin is nearest. That's it. No dashboard, no second window. The terrain gets the screen.
Walk straight to anything
Tap any pin and a small card tells you what it is and where it is from you: 42 m E of you · 3 notes · last 1 Sep. Tap Navigate and an arrow on your dot points the way, the strip counts down the distance, and the edge of the screen glows teal while you're heading true, orange if you drift, red if you're well off. When you're within a few metres it simply says You're here.
There's no pin where you want to go? Tap the spot on the map and navigate there instead. Two months ago this needed a separate screen. Now it's one tap on the map you're already looking at.
And when you find something worth recording, press + in the dock. The pin lands exactly where you're standing and its card opens for a name and a note. Offline, it queues and syncs the moment you're back in range, as before.
Contour walk, on the same map
Contour walk is now a mode of the same view. Switch between Field walk and Contour walk from the pill in the bottom dock without leaving the map. Tap Lock my height to follow the contour under your boots, or tap the map to pick a different elevation; the target contour highlights in orange so you can see the line you're chasing, not just an arrow pointing at it.
The guidance itself is unchanged in the ways that matter. On the line, drifting off, off the line. A sound when the state changes so you can watch the ground rather than the phone. Press Start walk to record, End & save to put the walked line on your map as a real, editable design line. If a save can't complete out of range, the walk is kept and offered back to you the next time you open the map. It won't be lost.
Why this matters for design
Permaculture design is a conversation between what you drew and what the land does. Every time you have to translate between two maps, a miniature and the real one, some of that conversation is lost. You stop, you reorient, you tap back and forth.
From the desk to the field
You can a great new design for your land, but how do you get the design on the land?
Walk there. Navigate to a pin, to where an orchard is starting, to where you want to build a shed.
From the field to the desk
Good design starts with observation. While out on the field amongst the trees, mark a spot for a tree, place a pin where you want the apple tree to go, and walk a new path.
Fieldwalker records it all.
With 1.1 there's nothing to translate. The swale line you drew at the desk is the line you're walking. The pin from last winter's wet patch is the pin you're navigating to today. Observation and design happen on one surface, and that surface is the property.
What the last few weeks of releases covered
Version 1.1 caps a run of smaller releases since the 1.0 milestone in August. If you've been using Fieldwalker through that period, here's what quietly got better:
- Sharper map captures (1.0.3). Small captures come in at their true sharpness instead of being held back as blurry, and drawing a path or boundary stays safe while you pan.
- One visual language across the app (1.0.4). Clearer signals, a smoother map-capture flow, a redesigned georeferencing screen, and faster pin drops with photos you can add to existing notes.
- Touch capture and cleaner exports (1.0.5, 1.0.6). Drawing a capture box now works reliably by touch on phones and tablets. Exports keep their text labels, and tree, pin and water symbols render correctly in PDF instead of sometimes turning solid black.
- Boundaries from GeoJSON (1.0.7). Import a single boundary from a GeoJSON file, or every polygon in it at once, each as its own named boundary.
- Exports that open every time (1.0.8). The export preview could appear to do nothing in the Illustrated style or with a parent map's reference layer showing. It opens reliably now.
- Walk to any pin or point (1.0.10). The first version of live guidance to a target, which 1.1 now folds into the main map.
- Faster high-resolution elevation (1.1). Behind the scenes, we removed an upload limit that was slowing down fulfilment of your elevation-data requests. If you've asked for survey-grade LiDAR for your property, it gets to you sooner.
None of these are headline features. Together they're the difference between a tool you try and a tool you rely on.
Two things to know
The map stays north-up in this release. We looked hard at rotating the whole map to your heading, as the old Field Walker did, and decided the cost in stability wasn't worth it yet. The heading cone on your dot tells you which way you're facing; the arrow always points the right way.
And Contour walk still needs your map downloaded for offline use first, from Menu → Offline. That's deliberate: the paddock where you need it may be the one with no signal.
Open your map on your phone, tap Field walk, and go for a walk.