Designing Show Jumping Courses on Your Phone
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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 view: Shared links open the read-only 2D course plan. 3D in the Designer is in early access for selected beta accounts.
Walk it before the builder arrives
The phone's strength is the ringside. Open the read-only course plan and walk each line on foot. A turn that looked generous on the plan can show 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 course plan link. Riders, parents and the course builder open the 2D plan 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 sharing the course plan, it is often the better tool. Open the course design app and try it from wherever you are standing.
Related: How to design a show jumping course · Design your course on your phone · Show jumping course design software
Design tools: Free show jumping course designer · Course design software · UK course design guide · Open the designer