Golf CV - manage your "Golf Career"

[Ulrich Mayring]

Hi folks,

my winter project this year was neither a new set of clubs, nor a new golf swing. Instead I decided to do something a little more involved and proceeded to butcher the entire spring as well

Anyway, for quite some time I have been looking for a tool that will help me keep track of my "golf career", which basically means: when did I play, where did I play and what happened in the process. My two primary goals were flexibility and autonomy. I wanted to decide myself how much and which data to enter, even spottily remembered rounds should be sensibly manageable. On the other hand I did not want to relinquish control over my data's usage and practices such as backup. So an online service wasn't right for me, it had to be a desktop application running on my local machine.

The first version of Golf CV is now done and contains mainly my personal vision for round tracking and statistics. However, I am definitely planning to expand into more GA-related areas such as course reviews and rankings. For example, it should certainly be possible to list a course's architect(s) and opening year, so I'd be delighted if anyone here finds Golf CV useful and comes up with ideas for improvement. I am also expecting a few bugs, seeing that I am currently the only person who has ever used it.

Golf CV is available in English and German and should run on any computer that has Java installed. I have done some rudimentary testing under Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

A final note: the startup dialog has a button to create a "Demo CV". This generates a bunch of fictitious golfers, courses and rounds, so you have a decent set of data for evaluating the program. I would recommend to start playing with that before entering your own data. Obviously, the test data is a bit "funky", after all it's just some random numbers.

The deal is this: you don't pay any money and I don't provide any services

Some basic information about the feature set can be found under http://www.golfcv.de and you'll also find the dowload link there.

Have fun and thanks in advance for any feedback,

Ulrich

[Ulrich Mayring]

I've put out a new version today, which might be of interest to architecture aficionados. It'll not only allow you to keep track of the courses you played, but also who designed them, when they were built and how you would rank them compared to others. This way you can build your own Course Rankings hitlist. Also, if you're on a Top 100 quest or something similar you can easily adapt the program to track your progress.

You'll find a few screenshots at http://www.golfcv.de, which should give you a basic idea how it works. For a quick hands-on experience, just download it and create a demo CV as detailed in the previous posting.

Ulrich

[Ulrich Mayring]

Today's new release 1.2.5 has support for ranking courses according to the GCE Scale.

Ulrich

[David Harshbarger]

Ulrich,

I love what you've done.  When are you going to make a cloud version that I can access from my iPad and iPhone?

Dave

[Ulrich Mayring]

David,

as soon as someone either pays me for that or provides the cloud space for free ;-)

Your GCA Atlas is pretty cool, too. Are you doing it by hand or do you use a tool to generate the map?

cheers,

Ulrich

[David Harshbarger]

Ulrich,

Much like your map, I'm using free mapping tools from Google.  They have a mapping app that writes back to your choice of Google Docs or Google Fusion Tables.  I went with the fusion tables, for a number of reasons, but mostly because it has native KML generation.  In fact the KML link allows you to use Google Earth, which is an even cooler view on the data than the browser.

Harvesting the links off of GCA.com, getting the course URL, tracking down year and archtitect, and placing the location is all by hand.  The markers often align with Google's place markers, but when there's ambiguity, like at Pinehurst, I try to figure out where the course starts and place the marker there.

I like that you have an underlying data model that you publish; I believe there's an opportunity to develop an open resource of GCA material, and for the structured content having a robust data model is key.  It looks like you have a good model.  I haven't researched the free cloud development platforms recently.  Salesforce.com had a low price platform, and if you modeled your app as a community rating and CV tool where individuals build up shared data, like the courses, augmented with their personal content, rounds, you might find the expense is worth effort. You might also find that if you can get a mobile face on the data entry, so users can record on course, you would get more adoption.  Mobile and cloud is where it is at!

Your map is pretty cool, too.  I like how you have a photo in the information window.  Very nice.

Dave

[Ulrich Mayring]

I am also convinced that Mobile and Cloud are the future. However, there is one problem with that, which is basically the reason why I developed Golf CV as a local application in the first place.

I've been using a cloud service for keeping track of my rounds and courses I played. Of course that was nowhere near as comfortable, feature-rich and customized to my personal needs, but for many years it was enough for me. But then, one day, the provider of the service had a hardware crash and the backups didn't work either. After much to and fro the fact remained that about six weeks of data was lost forever. For me this included a lot of valuable data from a Scotland trip.

So I decided that this is never going to happen to me again. I needed to take control of my own data, so that the many hours I put into data entry would not depend on the whims of a third party. That was the starting impulse to do Golf CV. Meanwhile its capabilities are far beyond the original cloud service and I wouldn't go back, even if the data ownership problem was resolved.

But I did have your point in mind that perhaps a central database of courses etc. would be helpful. Also to produce community rankings by combining the rankings of all users. The data model is ready for that (or at least easily adaptable), but I'd like to have some kind of distributed storage, which I haven't quite thought through.

Ulrich

[Anders Rytter]

Ulrich,
nice work, I like the Season goal feature. I like to track Fairways, Scrambles and putts but havent thought of setting a goal and tracking it like that.