Version 1.17 is out

We have released version 1.17 of Jaktli. The big news is that the app writes the hunt PM for you. You plan the hunt in the calendar, drives, stands and who stands where, and the PM comes out by itself, in the app or as a PDF to print. The app also uses far less battery during a hunt, trails on the map no longer jump when the GPS loses its grip, and the call signs you use on the radio come along into the app. The dog shows on the map what it is doing, the hunt chat tells you what happens during the hunt by itself, the map has more measuring tools and an MGRS grid, and a document folder can be limited to some of the team.

The hunt PM writes itself

The app writes the hunt PM for you from what you have already entered. It holds the safety rules, allowed game with classes and counts, the meeting place with address and map, the hunt leadership with phone numbers, the Jaktli code with a QR code for external guest hunters, the radio channel, the schedule, and a map with the stand list for every drive. No-shoot areas show on the maps.

Tap Print and you get a PDF with one page per drive, to print, save or pass on. Everyone gets the same paper whether they print from a phone or a computer. For a nicer printout, turn on Title page with the team logo.

The map in the app is the same picture as in the printout, so everyone looks at the same map. When two stands sit close together the name is moved a little away, with a line to its stand, so no name lands on top of another. Under How the maps look in the PM details, the hunt leader can make the text and the stands bigger or smaller, make the lines thicker and turn on a scale bar and a north arrow, for this hunt only. The team's defaults, including which map the printout uses, are changed by an administrator in the team settings under Maps in the hunt PM, or with Save as the team's defaults in a hunt's PM. While the plan is a draft, the hunt PM row on the hunt's page says Draft.

What you need to fill in yourself goes under PM details: meeting place, allowed game, radio and what applies to this particular hunt. The team's safety rules and the team's radio you enter once in the team settings, and they come with every hunt PM. Hunting the same game as last time? Tap Copy from an earlier hunt.

The rest of the PM comes from the plan. A group hunt in the calendar now has Plan hunt details. There you split the hunt into drives, each with its own time and area. Tap Choose stands and the stands, towers and shooting lanes come from the team map, only those inside the drive's area.

Then you place the shooters. Either yourself, stand by stand, or with Draw lots. Turn on Avoid repeats and the app prefers stands the shooter has not had before, in this hunt, this season or ever. Stands you placed by hand are never redrawn.

Everyone in the team gets a role: shooter, dog handler, driver, hunt leader or other. The role follows from the team role, and you can change it for the whole hunt or for a single drive. Only shooters take part in the draw.

Below the drives you add the hunt's schedule: gathering, briefing, lunch, coffee and the game parade, with time and place. And under Hunt leadership you choose the hunt leader, deputy hunt leader, host and wounded game trackers, several if you like, in the order you call them. The host can be a member or a contact, such as the landowner.

The plan is a draft until you tap Publish. Then everyone sees their stand on the hunt's page, without anyone getting a notification. You can plan the hunt before everyone has answered, and the app warns you if a stand is held by someone who declined or has not replied.

If you subscribe to the team calendar on your phone, the meeting place, the hunt leadership, the radio, the allowed game, the schedule and your own stand come along there too. Everything about how it works is in the handbook, under hunt PM and stand allocation.

Far less battery

The phone has to last the whole hunting day. We went through everything the app does to the phone while a hunt is running, from how often the map redraws to how positions are sent, and fixed most of it. The result is sweeping battery improvements.

Position sharing also no longer stops quietly after a bad connection. If the app got an error from the server, it could previously stop sending and lose the latest positions. Now it waits and tries again, and sends the newest positions first so the team sees where you are as soon as reception is back. The same goes for Jaktli OpenTrack.

Your own trail on the map now shows the last 15 minutes, the same as the others'. The whole trail is still in the hunt log.

Trails no longer jump

Several of you have written to us about trails that jump: a hunter standing still on a stand suddenly looks as if they ran a hundred metres into the forest and back. That is the phone's GPS losing its grip for a moment, usually in dense forest or when you stand still, and Jaktli used to draw every such position as it came in.

Now the app clears the jumps out. Positions with worse than 100 metres of accuracy are discarded, and a single position that darts away and straight back is removed from the trail. No position is moved, only bad ones are removed. This applies to the trails on the map during the hunt, the replay in the hunt log and the distance in the hunt log, so a quiet stand in dense forest no longer counts as ten kilometres.

The dot that shows where a hunter is right now always shows the latest position, and the safety arrows towards other hunters are based on it. To see the trails exactly as they came in, turn off Smooth GPS trails under Hunt in the map filter.

The compass twitched too. Every little tremble turned the map slightly, so it never quite stood still. Now the map only turns when your heading has really changed. And the map's dot for your own position follows the same positions that are sent to the team, instead of a separate GPS reading, so what you see is what the team sees.

Call signs from the radio

Many teams talk on the radio and use short names: Fox, Tower 3, Kalle on the Hill. What you hear on the radio should match what you see in the app. So every member now has a call sign.

Tap yourself in the member list, tap Call sign, enter the call sign and tap Save. An administrator can enter the call sign for anyone in the team, so the whole team is done in an evening. Two people in the same team cannot have the same call sign.

The call sign is shown after the name everywhere the team is listed: in the member list, in the stand allocation, in the hunt PM and in the hunt leadership. On the drive maps in the PM, where space is short, the call sign stands in for the name. Type @ in the chat and it finds the person by call sign too.

On the map during the hunt you choose how hunters are labelled. Open Map settings and pick under People on the map: Initials, Full names, Nicknames or Call signs. The choice applies to everyone on the map, including those hunting on another part of the ground and those sharing their position outside a hunt. It is saved on your account and follows you to all your phones and the computer. The full name always shows when you tap a hunter.

The nickname is new and optional. You enter it in your profile, and it applies in all your teams. Without a nickname or call sign the initials are shown. More in the handbook.

During the hunt

While a planned hunt is running, the map shows the stands for the drive in progress. Your own stand has an orange ring, and the Your stand button at the top gives you an arrow and the distance. Organisers see who stands on each stand right next to its name.

Tap a hunter on the map and the card now has Call and Message buttons, if the hunter has a phone number in their profile. So you can reach your team-mate without leaving the map.

Hunt focus makes the map calmer. Only the drive's stands, parking spots and gathering places stand out. Everything else is faded, and the ground outside the drive gets a grey veil. Other hunters, dogs and no-shoot zones always show as usual. The Hunt focus button on the map switches it off and on.

The map filter has its own Hunt section now, with the trails, Only this hunt's stands and Show off-screen hunters. The arrows at the edge of the map for hunters out of view now show on all four edges, also when you have panned away from your own position.

If you leave the hunt, it keeps running for everyone still in it. If you started the hunt, or are an administrator, and tap Leave hunt while others are still in it, the app now asks whether to end the hunt for everyone or only leave. A hunt nobody ended closes by itself after four hours without activity, so no hunt is left hanging overnight.

A group hunt from the calendar is started and ended by the hunt leader, whoever created the hunt or an administrator. Everyone else joins once it is running. And the Ongoing hunt button on the home screen only shows while a hunt is actually running.

The dogs

When the dog is on point or treed you now see it on the map itself, without tapping. The ring around the dog's dot turns orange for On point and red for Treed, and the word sits under the dog's name. If the collar loses contact the dot turns grey with Lost contact under the name. A phone on the dog does not know what the dog is doing, so it shows no status.

The hunt chat follows the hunt

The app writes short lines into the hunt chat on its own while the hunt is running: when someone logs a sighting, a downed animal, a wounded animal or tracks, for example "Kalle downed moose", and when someone joins or leaves the hunt. So everyone can follow along without looking at the map.

The lines sit in the middle of the chat with no speech bubble and cannot be replied to, edited or deleted. Tap a line about an observation and it opens on the map, or in the hunt log once the hunt is over. Lines about who joined or left do not count as unread, so the chat button does not light up for every hunter who arrives.

Measure on the map

The ruler button now opens a menu with four tools:

• From my position, as before.
• Between two points. Set the start and end anywhere on the map, without the map jumping to your position.
• Circle around a point. Set the centre, on a tower if you like, and pull out the radius. You can also type the radius in metres. The box shows the radius and the area the circle covers, and the circle can be dragged by its centre.
• Line of sight, which has moved here from the terrain button. It now says where the view is blocked and how high the ground rises above the sight line. Eye height and target height are set in half-metre steps, the line is drawn while you choose, and both end points can be dragged afterwards. The blocked part is drawn grey and dashed.

When you move a tower on the map, its visible area is shown while you drag, so you see at once whether the new spot gives a better view. This works in the app and on the web.

The crosshair in the middle of the map now reads exactly the point it sits on. Before, the point was a little above, so measurements, new markers and tower views could end up slightly off.

MGRS grid

Under Overlays in the map style picker you can turn on the MGRS grid, the grid the armed forces and many GPS units use to give a position. The squares get finer as you zoom in, from 100 km down to a few metres, and every tenth line is a little heavier so the grid is easy to follow. The grid is off by default and only changes your own map.

Tap a marker or an observation and its MGRS position is shown next to the coordinates, for example 33V XF 06776 59296, even with the grid turned off. Tap the coordinates or the MGRS position to copy it, ready to paste into a message.

Lines become areas

When you import a boundary from another program, it often arrives as a line. Tap the line and choose Convert to area, and it becomes a hunting ground, sub-area or forbidden area with the same name. Open ends are joined with a straight edge. Closed tracks from WeHunt are now imported as areas straight away.

On the web, under Manage map features, an administrator can select all closed lines and convert them to areas in one go. The page also has a tools box, groups that fold away, and buttons for delete, activate and book directly on each row.

Photos and trail cameras

Tap Select in the gallery or in a trail camera's photos, or hold your finger on a photo, to tick several and delete them in one go. Photos you may not delete are dimmed.

Trail camera photos are now grouped by day, with Today and Yesterday at the top. And Mark all seen clears the dot from every new photo at once, for all cameras or for a single one.

Folders only some can see

An administrator can now limit a document folder so that only some of the team see it, for the board's minutes, contracts or finances for example. Hold your finger on the folder in the app, or tap the three dots next to it on the web, and choose Manage access. Choose Only some and tick the roles that should see the folder, for example Treasurer, and the people who should see it regardless of role.

Anyone who may not see the folder does not see it at all, neither the folder nor the documents in it. Subfolders follow their folder and can be limited further, but never opened to more people. Administrators always see every folder. Limited folders show a small padlock next to the name.

The treasurer and read-only members

The treasurer now handles billing. The treasurer can open Billing, pay the subscription, add seats, cancel or reactivate, and receives the team's emails about receipts and payments. Edit the billing details straight from the billing page with Edit billing details. Chairpersons and board members receive the billing emails too.

New role: Read-only member. A read-only member sees everything in the team that a regular member sees, but cannot change the map, the calendar or the team's other information. They can chat, answer hunt calls, join a hunt someone else started, share their position, report observations and upload photos to the gallery. The role takes a seat, just like a regular member.

The watch app

The Garmin watch app now shows the time of day at the bottom of the dog radar and the map. On the Instinct it sits in the lower right corner. If you do not want it, hold the up button (MENU) in the watch app and turn Clock off, or change it under the app's settings in Garmin Connect. The watch app also works with the Enduro 4 and the D2 Mach 1, 2 and 2 Pro watches now, so it supports around eighty models. More in the handbook.

On the web

• Save in team settings had not worked on the web since the spring. That is fixed.
• Terrain shading and 3D terrain remember how you had them.
• Drag a marker to move it. A tower shows its visible area while you drag.

Other

• The Jaktli mark. Anyone who works at Jaktli and is in your team or your hunt has a small green J on their picture and the label JAKTLI after their name, so you know who it is.
• The status bar at the top of the map has white text over aerial imagery and black over the topo map, and works as it should on iOS 27.
• On Android the Maps app button always asks which app to open the location in.
• The hunt log button is now called Add sighting, downed, wounded or tracks, so it is clear what can be added afterwards.
• External guest hunters see the hunt PM for the hunt they are on, and see the team's other running hunts on the map, so the no-shoot zones are right.
• The app returns to the team by itself once the subscription is paid, even if someone else paid from another phone.
• The buttons along the left edge of the map stay below the top row on a small screen, and scroll when they do not fit.
• The map's credit line now sits above the dog bar and the other bars at the bottom, so it can be read.
• Adding a tracker that is already added gives a clear message instead of an error.
• Plus smaller fixes and improvements.

Let us know if anything is giving you trouble. We read all feedback.