Sports WhiteBoard Player/Positioning Teaching Aid for your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch
USER MANUAL
VERSION 2.0 Last update: 7/22/2012
Sandcrater Software, 95 Brown Rd. Ste 229, Ithaca NY 14850 –
[email protected]
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PREFACE Hockey Whiteboard was conceived in February of 2009. That year I found myself as the assistant coach on my son's mite hockey team and frequently in need of describing basic positioning to seven and eight year olds. I can remember one specific instance where our two defensemen had come off the ice and were in need of a reminder as to how they should move when the puck moves in the offensive zone. I grabbed our whiteboard/clipboard, a dry erase marker and marked where the center, left wing, right wing and defensemen should be when the puck is in the corner in the offensive zone. They seemed to follow along just fine. However, I then tried to explain that when the puck moved to the opposite corner in the offensive zone (which I showed by drawing an arrow from the puck to the other side of the ice) the defense had to shift as well (drawing arrows from the two "D's" I had written on the whiteboard to show their movement). Their eyes started to glaze over and/or they just nodded at me to get me to stop talking so they could think about getting back on the ice. I couldn't say as though I blamed them. I'm probably not the best at explaining it either. At the same time I had been doing some work with iPhone programming and had come across some demo code from Apple called "touches". This demo simply had three colored boxes that you could drag around the screen at will. The purpose of the demo code was to show developers how to handle basic "multi touch" gestures on the iPhone. It struck me that if you could drag three boxes around the screen, why not a bunch of players on top of a picture that represented an ice surface? I got busy coding and had a prototype done in a day. It did not do much, just put 10 players on the screen (and a puck) and let me drag them around. At my son's end of the year tournament, I brought my iPhone on the bench and used it once or twice. Those same kids who had their eyes glazed over were now glued to the screen. Young kids really love seeing this stuff on the device and I had their attention. So, did that early prototype make a difference in our tournament? Well, our team did win the tournament, but I wouldn't give the credit to Hockey Whiteboard. What Hockey WhiteBoard did provide was another tool that could help teach the game in a way that was "cooler" than simply using a traditional whiteboard with dry erase markers. For fun, I cleaned up Hockey Whiteboard a little bit and put it up on the App Store. I sold a few here and there and got some good feedback that I used to make it better. Over time I added versions for soccer, basketball, baseball and field hockey. Today's version does so much more than that original prototype! Over the next two years I've heard from coaches at all levels who have used Hockey Whiteboard. I originally only envisioned it being used with younger kids, but I've heard from high school coaches, college coaches and even semi professional coaches that they use it and love it. If you've been a Hockey Whiteboard user for a while, you may recall that I issued an update last August which caused the application to crash on startup. This was an odd situation where something in Apple's distribution process caused a problem because my development versions (and the versions Apple used when reviewing the application) worked fine. I heard from coaches who were using it for summer tournaments and were most unhappy that the update had caused them to loose this tool! Fortunately, Apple fixed the distribution process, expedited and update for me and a new version that functioned fine was available in a short period of time.
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In January of 2012 I began a total rewrite of the Sports WhiteBoard products with a slightly new paradigm—instead of providing multiple views of the playing field, provide one nice graphic that you can pinch, zoom and rotate so you can focus on the exact area you need to! I teamed up with a local graphic artist to produce much nicer playing surfaces, icons and images so that the Sports WhiteBoard apps looked great! The result of this hard work is a set of applications that I hope work very well for coaches of their respective sports. When I first released Hockey WhiteBoard in March of 2009, it was the first “white board” application on the App Store that treated players as movable dots to make it easier to show player positioning and movement. Over the years there have been many similar applications that have been released, but I’d like to think that Hockey WhiteBoard was the original! The 2.0 version of each application brings them up to date with features in iOS 5 (such as iCloud) and improve usability based on user feedback over the years. While I believe the result is a much better product, I certainly understand that any product can be improved! Please don’t hesitate to send me your ideas and suggestions to make any of the WhiteBoard apps even better! We’re reachable via email (
[email protected]) and on FaceBook (www.facebook.com/SandcraterSoftware). I look forward to hearing from you! Ron DiNapoli Owner, Sandcrater Software Ithaca, NY
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WELCOME Thank you for purchasing a Sandcrater “Sports WhiteBoard” application. To begin using your new application, simply tap on its icon. When launched for the first time, you will be presented with the playing surface (field, court, or ice) with players in their most common position. Keep in mind that beginning with iOS 4.0, Apple introduced the concept of multitasking into iOS. Put simply, that means that when you press your device’s HOME button (physical button with picture of square centered at the bottom of your device) the application is simply suspended, not quit. If you tap on the application’s icon again the application will be brought back into the foreground and execution will pick up from the point at which it was suspended. Unless you explicitly terminate the application it will always be running. As such, you will infrequently see the default configuration below. As such, we suggest that you create your own “default” whiteboard configuration that you’d like to use as a common “starting point”. When you have done this, you can save the white board and then simply reload it each time you would like a fresh white board.
Default white board configuration for Baseball WhiteBoard
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When you have a default white board setting saved it will be easy to load the white board using the control icons. If you are using an iPad, the control icons appear along the left side of the display when in portrait orientation or along the bottom of the display when in landscape orientation. If you are using an iPhone or iPod touch, you will not see the control icons when the application launches. On these smaller devices, you must double-‐tap anywhere on the device where there isn’t a player or item (such as a ball, puck, etc.) to bring up a palette containing all of the control icons. The control icons are used to control many of the features in your Sports WhiteBoard application. With them, you will be able to lock out the pinch/zoom and scroll functions, rotate the field either clockwise or counter clockwise, toggle trailing lines, erase any hand drawn and trailing lines, edit
team data and more. We’ll look at each of these functions individually after we cover some basic functionality.
BASIC OPERATION
To begin using the Sports WhiteBoard application, simply tap on a player and move its circle! When you tap on the player, its circle will grow (the exact amount is configurable) under your finger signaling that it is ready to be moved. Drag the player anywhere on the playing surface to reposition. If you find it is difficult to release the player at the precise location you would like to, you can try reducing the magnification factor of the player while being moved (this is a setting we will cover below). All field surfaces support the ability to pinch/zoom and rotate. The combination of zoom and rotate would allow you to focus on half the playing surface or even a very particular area of the playing surface. When zooming, the players and items (such as the puck/ball, etc.) do not shrink/grow with the pinch/zoom action.
Soccer W hiteBoard, showing zoom/rotate
Double tapping on the playing surface (but NOT on a player) will cause the c ontrol icon palette to appear on the iPhone and iPod touch.
Rotation of the field is supported in 90 degree increments. As you can see to the left, the soccer field has been rotated once and zoomed to show a particular area of the field. It is important to remember that once you launch the Sports WhiteBoard application, it is continually “running” unless you explicitly terminate it. A forced termination of the application does not save its state! The only way to save the state of the white board (or team data) is to explicitly save the white board locally or to iCloud. Accessing such functionality as well as the many additional features available in your Sports WhiteBoard application is done via the control icons. On the iPad, these icons are constantly visible along the left or bottom edge of the device depending on its physical orientation. On the iPhone and iPod touch, you access the control icon palette by double-‐tapping anywhere on the playing surface. 6
CONTROL ICONS As previously mentioned the control icons appear along the left or bottom edge on the iPad version of the Sports WhiteBoard application, and appear in a “palette” on the iPhone/iPod touch version of the application when the playing surface is double-‐tapped. The control icons give you access to the following functionality:
The lock function is used temporarily disable the ability to pinch/zoom and scroll. It is useful when you have zoomed into an area of the playing surface and do not wish for unintended scrolling gestures while trying to move players and/or draw lines on the playing surface.
The clockwise rotation function rotates the playing surface 90 degrees clockwise. This is useful when you wish to focus on a particular area of the playing surface. All player positions and drawn lines should be appropriately rotated as well.
The counter clockwise rotation function rotates the playing surface 90 degrees counter clockwise. This is useful when you wish to focus on a particular area of the playing surface. All player positions and drawn lines should be appropriately rotated as well.
The trailing lines function is used to enable the drawing of a “trailing line” whenever a player is moved. This is useful for demonstrating where a player came from after changing its position. Currently, trailing lines are not saved when a white board is saved. An example of trailing lines in use in Hockey WhiteBoard is shown to the left. The erase function is used to erase any hand drawn and trailing lines appearing on the white board. On an iPhone or iPod touch, you may also shake the device to erase the lines. Trailing lines in Hockey W hiteBoard
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The team management function is used to access team data. Team data is provided as a convenience to you to allow you to edit multiple white boards without having to re-‐customize the team each time. Some coaches will prefer to have the players be able to show jersey numbers of actual players on his/her team and may wish to have the player’s name appear below the corresponding circle. While it is possible to change player labels (the name that appears below the player circle) and designations (the letters/numbers that appear inside the circle) on an ad-‐hoc basis by long-‐pressing any player in the field, using the team edit function allows you to set up a team that can be loaded into any whiteboard. It also lets you determine how many players are on the team in total. We’ll look at the specifics of team management in a separate section.
The action item function is used to access the ability to print the white board (if you have a supported AirPrint™ printer, email a photo of the white board to someone or save a photo of the white board to your Photo library. The white board management function is used to load, save and/or delete white board “files” from your local device or from your iCloud storage. Managing white boards will be covered in detail in a later section.
The settings function allows you to modify white board settings associated with the current white board. This includes player size, player magnification when tapped, whether or not labels appear under the players and the color of any trailing lines drawn . There is also an option here to place additional “items” on the playing surface. The exact number and kinds of “items” available vary by sport. In Hockey WhiteBoard, you can place an additional puck, cone, tire or stick on the ice. It should be noted that once an item is placed on the player surface you can rotate it clockwise by 90 degrees by long-‐pressing it. If you want to remove it from the playing surface, double-‐tap it! The colored circles in the control icon palette are “pens” that activate the ability to hand draw lines on the playing surface. Three pens are made available and come in default colors of red, green and blue. You can customize the color of any of these pens associated with a given white board by long-‐pressing the pen. When the pen is long-‐pressed, a color selector will appear. Tap anywhere in the color wheel to choose a new color. To draw on the playing surface, tap one of the pens (it will be redrawn a little larger to indicate that it is active and the lock control will automatically activate so that drawing motions don’t inadvertently activate the scrolling mechanism. To disable a pen, tap on it again.
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The reset function is used to return the white board to the state it appears in when it is launched for the first time. You will be asked to confirm that you wish to do this as any unsaved edits will be lost.
The help function provides a quick summary of what each control icon does.
TEAM DATA By default, each Sports WhiteBoard application provides you with two teams that have generic designations and labeling. This team data is not “saved” anywhere, it merely exists in the application itself to be displayed before you load any data or whiteboards yourself. For example, in Hockey WhiteBoard you are first given two teams that are identical except for their color. They both have two defensemen, two wingers, a center and a goalie, for a total of six players. Knowing this , let’s take a look at the Team Management view to see what you can do with each team: This view shows that there is one team stored locally on the device and that team’s name is “SnowBelt1”. If we look at the segmented control at the top of the view, we see that “Team 1” is the darker color—which means it is the active team. Any other controls/settings in this view will apply to Team #1. We see that the team name is “SnowBelt1”. Since there is also a visible file of the same name, we can assume that the team data stored in “SnowBelt1” is currently loaded for Team #1. This view also tells us that there are currently 6 players on the ice and that the team color is red. If you’d like to change the color of Team #1, you can tap on the colored circle that shows you the current color and a color picker will appear allowing you to choose a new color. The +/-‐ stepper allows us to control the number of players from this team that are on the ice, but we’ll cover more about that a little later. The “Manage Team Data” view also presents a number of buttons in the toolbar at the bottom. Let’s focus on the “Edit” button first as it will help explain more about what type of data is stored with a team! If you tap the “Edit” button you will be presented with a new view that shows all the players currently defined for a given team.
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The image to the right shows the default team assigned in Hockey WhiteBoard on the iPhone or iPod touch. At this point you may edit any of the players to change their designation (the letters/numbers that appear inside the circle) or their label (the letters that may appear underneath their circle). When you are done editing the players in this view, the changes should be reflected immediately on the white board. In addition to the “Done” button, there are two buttons that appear in the lower left corner of the view. The first (the “+” button) allows you to add a new player to this team. New players are always added at the bottom. The second is a trash can. If you select one of the rows in the table, the trash can button will activate. If you press it, the currently selected row is deleted. To demonstrate the use of this screen, let’s edit this team to put player’s jersey numbers as the designation and their first names as the label. At this point, we can press “Done” to return to the “Manage Team Data” view. We won’t notice any changes to that view yet; if we press “Done” again we will return to the ice view. The control icon palette will likely still be showing, so if we double tap to hide it the ice surface will look similar to the image on the next page…
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It’s a little tough to see the labels at the lowest zoom factor on an iPhone, so let’s zoom in to get a better look…
Here we can see that our changes were immediately reflected on the ice surface. It is important to note at this point that no team data has been changed. If you were to turn off your iPhone (or iPad/iPod touch) or forcibly quit the application, the data would be lost. To save the team data, return to the “Manage Team Data” view by tapping in the control icon palette.
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successfully:
To proceed with saving the team data, type a new name in the “Team Name:” text field and then tap the “Save” button below. When saving, make sure you note the status of the segmented control that offers the options of “Local Teams” and “iCloud Teams”. If “Local Teams” is the darker segment, your team data will be saved locally on your device and only available to the Sports WhiteBoard application running on that device. If the “iCloud Teams” segment is darker, your team data will be saved to iCloud (if enabled on this device) and will be available to any instance of this Sports WhiteBoard application running on a device that is configured to use the same AppleID for iCloud. For the purposes of this demonstration, we’ll call the team “Bad News Red Bears” and save the data locally. After typing in “Bad News Red Bears” in the “Team Name:” text field and tapping the “Save” button below, you should see a confirmation alert letting you know that the save operation completed After tapping “OK”, you should see that the team “Bad News Red Bears” appears in the listing of locally saved teams. NOTE: If using a 2.0 version of some Sports WhiteBoard applications the “just saved” team name may not appear immediately in the list of available teams. If this happens, simply exit the “Manage Team Data” view and then return. The team list should then display properly.
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Two buttons that appear in the “Manage Team Data” view that we haven’t mentioned yet are the “Load” button and the “Delete” button. The “Delete” button simply deletes the currently selected team from the local device OR from iCloud depending on how the Local/iCloud segmentation control is set. Tapping the “Load” button when a saved team is selected causes that team data to be loaded for Team #1 or Team #2, depending on how the Team1/Team2 segmentation control is set. To exemplify this, let’s continue our demonstration from above. If we go back to the “Manage Team Data” view and tap on the “Team 2” segment in the Team1/Team2 segmented control, we should see something like this: Notice that the color circle has changed to blue to denote the fact that Team #2 is the blue team. If we tap on the “Bad News Red Bears” entry we just created and then tap “Load”, we will load the same team data we saved for Team #1 into Team #2. This will give us two identical teams. When we tap “Load” we will be returned to the ice view and we will see something similar to the image on the left. As you can see, both teams now have identical data. This is not likely what you want, but it helps demonstrate that team data is used to store designations/labels/color for a given team to be loaded onto either side of the white board later. This saves you from the tedious process of entering your team’s data for each white board you wish to create. The notion of “team data” is kept separate from the notion of “white board data”. As we’ll see in the next section, when you save a white board the player data is stored as independently of the team data. This means that if you send your white board to another user, they’ll have the correct player designations/labels/color in the white board, but they will NOT have your team listed in their “Manage Team Data” view.
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WHITEBOARD DATA White board data is everything needed to represent the state of your white board. This includes information about player designations, labels, color and positioning, as well as field orientation, hand drawn lines and their colors, current zoom factor and scroll offset. Any settings applied to your white board (covered in the next section) are also saved with white board data. To access saved white board data or to save the state of the current white board, tap on the “Manage Whiteboards” control icon in the control palette. You will be presented with a screen similar to the one on the left. At the top of the view you will see a segmentation control that allows you to choose between white board data stored locally on the device or data stored in iCloud. If you were a user of a previous version of this Sports WhiteBoard application (1.x version), you will see any white board data saved with the 1.x version in this view marked with a “v1.x” suffix. If the entry does not contain the “v1.x”, it is assumed to be a version 2.x data file. The controls here are simple. You may select a saved white board from the list and then tap the “Load” button at the bottom of the view. Doing so overwrites the state of the current white board with the stored state from the white board being loaded. If you select a saved white board from the list and tap the “Delete” button you will delete that white board from storage. It should be noted that the controls work the same regardless of whether you are storing/loading white boards locally or to/from iCloud. If you are utilizing iCloud, you should be aware that if you save a white board on one device and try to immediately load it on another you might get an error from the Sports WhiteBoard application stating that the file cannot be loaded. If this happens, wait a few minutes and try again. Testing has shown that on some occasions it may take a minute or two for white board data to be fully uploaded to iCloud. If you would like to save white board data, type a new name for the current state of the white board in the “Name: “ text field. We can, for example, save the current state of our white board with the name “offense” by typing “offense” into the “Name:” text field and then tapping the “Save” button at the bottom of the view. When the white board is saved, we’ll get a confirmation alert, like this:
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We are immediately returned to the playing surface view! If we then acknowledge the alert and return to the “Manage Whiteboards” view, we will see the following: As you can see, the “offense” saved white board is now visible in our list of saved white boards.
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PREFERENCES The preferences view may be accessed by tapping the preferences icon in the control icon palette. The preferences view allows you to alter four basic settings for the current white board. The first, is the size of the player. The further to the right this slider is, the larger the player. The second setting you may change is the amount of magnification the player will exhibit while being dragged. The further to the right this slider is, the larger the magnification factor used while dragging the player. While having a larger magnification factor will make it easier to see that your dragging the player, having a larger magnification factor will make it a little more difficult to precisely place the player when you release the drag. Experiment with this to see which setting works best for you! The third setting you may modify is whether or not labels will appear beneath the players. Finally, you may tap on the colored circle to change the color used when drawing trailing lines. In addition to the basic four settings you can modify via the preferences view, you may also add additional “items” to the playing surface. At minimum you will see a picture of the puck/ball used in that particular sport. To place the item on the ice, simply tap it in preferences view window. It will highlight momentarily signaling to you that it has been placed. If you return to the playing surface, you should see the new item. Depending on the sport, you may see some additional items to choose from such as a tire, cone, hockey stick, etc.. Once placed on the playing surface, items may be rotated 90 degrees in the clock wise direction by long-‐pressing them. Double-‐tap any item to remove it from the white board. At the bottom of the preferences view, you will see a button in the lower left hand corner titled “Validate Player Positions”. This button can be used in the unlikely event you are able to drag a player or item off of the playing surface. It will cause the application to look at all players and bring any that are too far off the surface right to the closest edge. They will still be partially obscured so you should look carefully to see where they appear after utilizing this function!
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MISCELLANEOUS TOPICS In addition to all the features and functionality available through the use of the control icons, the Sports WhiteBoard applications have some additional functionality that we will cover here. Long-‐Pressing Player Circles We covered the use of the “Team Management View” functionality earlier and showed how you can edit team data to customize the designation and labels for players on a team. It is also possible to simply long-‐press a given player circle to bring up a view that lets you change the information for that particular player. Such a change will also be reflected if you choose to edit team data through the “Team Management View”. For example, if we execute a long press on the following player: we will be presented with the view to the right which allows us to edit both the designation and label for the selected player. File Sharing All Sports WhiteBoard applications support the use of “iTunes File Sharing”. This means that if you are running iTunes while your device is connected you can visit the device’s “Apps” tab (in iTunes), scroll down to the “File Sharing” section and then select the appropriate sports whiteboard application. At the time of the writing of this manual, this might look like the following:
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In this particular example the “Hockey WhiteBoard” application has 6 files stored locally. Files that end in “.whiteboard” are white board files, files that end in “.team” are team data files, and files that end in “.v1whiteboard” are white board files from a 1.x version of the Sports WhiteBoard application. From iTunes, you can export these files (save as a file on your computer’s hard drive) or add new files that you may have exported from another machine. The iTunes file sharing mechanism will let you put any type of file into the application, but if you attempt to open it from the Sports WhiteBoard application (and it is in a foreign format), unpredictable behavior will result. Legacy File Access With the introduction of Version 2.0 of the Sports WhiteBoard applications, the format used to store data about a white board has completely changed when compared to the 1.x versions of the apps. If you install a 2.0 version of the Sports WhiteBoard application over it’s version 1.x predecessor, you will still be able to access any files from the older version in the 2.0 version. The only caveat is that, at this time, any saved lines that you may have had in the 1.x version will not be accessible in the 2.0 version. Player position as well as designation will be preserved. When you are looking at your list of saved white boards in a 2.0 version of a Sports WhiteBoard application, any white boards that were saved with an older version of the application will appear with a “(v1.x)” suffix. If you then save the file under a different name, it will be converted to use the newer 2.0 format.
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COMMENTS, QUESTIONS and CONCERNS Again, we’d like to thank you for purchasing a Sandcrater Software Sports WhiteBoard application. If at any point you would like to contact us regarding any problems you might have with the application or offer suggestions for new features, please feel free to email us at
[email protected] or visit our FaceBook page at http://www.facebook.com/SandcraterSoftware
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