Designing Show Jumping Courses on Your Phone

The best moment to tweak a course is rarely when you are sat at a desk — it is when you are standing in the arena, or watching the class before yours, or walking the lines after the course builder has set up. That is exactly when your phone beats a laptop. With a course design app in your pocket, the whole workflow travels with you.

You don't need an app-store download

YardForge is a progressive web app. Open yardforge.co.uk in Safari or Chrome on your phone, and you are designing — no install, no update prompts, no storage warnings. Add it to your home screen and it launches full-screen like any native app, syncing your courses across phone, tablet and desktop.

What works well on a phone

Placing and dragging fences on the scaled arena with touch.
Live stride distances — the stride calculator updates as you move fences, so you can sanity-check a related distance at the ringside.
Rule validation — FEI, British Showjumping, Hunter and Unaffiliated checks run as you design, and the app auto-fixes the errors it can.
3D and AR — this is where mobile shines. Walk the course in 3D at rider eye height, or place it in your real arena at full scale in augmented reality.

Walk it in AR before the builder arrives

Augmented reality is the phone's superpower. Stand in the empty arena, point your phone, and see your fences at full size on the actual surface. A turn that looked generous on the screen suddenly reveals itself as tight against the wall — and you fix it before a single pole is carried.

Designing when the signal drops

Steel-framed barns and rural arenas are signal black holes. Once the designer has loaded, it caches itself and keeps working offline; your saves sync the moment you reconnect. So a flat signal is no longer a reason to fall back to scribbling on a programme.

Share without anyone installing anything

When the course is ready, send a read-only 3D link. Riders, parents and the course builder open it in their own browser — no account, no download. It is the fastest way to get everyone walking the same plan.

The short version

A phone is not a compromise for course design — for walking, validating and visualising in AR, it is often the better tool. Open the course design app and try it from wherever you are standing.