Using the Player

Where a session starts, and where it drops you back at the end. Tap a plan anywhere in the app and this is the page you land on.

From the top: the plan name and the dog it is forked to, when you last trained it, and the plan's goals as a row of badges with the earned ones filled in. Then Next Step, which names exactly where the app will pick up, and Continue Training, which opens the Player there. You never have to choose a step to start.

Scroll and you get the rest of the plan: Plan Details (what the plan teaches, and often a paragraph on whether it is the right plan for your dog), Equipment Required, the Cue with a pencil to edit the word, Skills Required (the plans this one expects your dog to have already, each tappable), and last the Steps.

Split steps are hidden while you train, because the app reveals them when your dog needs them. But they are not secret. Scroll down to the step list and tap Show Splits for the full list. Tap any step to see its details and its demo video, and to Jump to this step in the Player directly. Preview Steps gives you the same thing as one scrollable run through the plan, every step with its details and video, and you can jump straight to any of them from there as well.

Two good reasons to look: a plan description that says "start with the first split step" is pointing you at a step the Player will not show you until later, and if you already know your dog needs the gentler version of a step, you can start there instead of failing your way down to it.

You can also hit the manual SPLIT button in the Player once a session is running, but you are choosing blind: the Player does not show you the whole list. The info page is the comfortable way to do it, because you can see where a step sits in the ladder before you pick it.

On the website, every step of a plan is listed by default, splits and proofs included, and with more detail than the phone app shows anywhere: the step type, the target reps, and the ratios the engine judges by, including the bail ratio that ends a step early when it is clearly going badly.

Often confused with

Proof steps, which are the harder end of a plan rather than the easier one, and which have their own route in the app. See Finding Proof Steps.

The current step, and the two buttons that record what your dog did.

From the top: the plan name, then the step. Under the step name is what to do, then SETUP (where your dog starts), PASS (what counts as success) and FAIL (what counts as not). Those three lines are the step's criteria, and they are worth reading before the first rep rather than during it.

Below that, the row of dots is the set, and they fill in as you judge. Five is the usual number but a step can ask for more or fewer; if there are more than fit, the tally scrolls along as they come in. When the last one fills, the app decides what happens next: push, drop, stick or split.

The green check is pass. The blue X is fail. Beside them plays a short demo video of the step being trained.

The videos are silent on purpose. Sound coming out of your phone mid-rep is one more thing for your dog to wonder about, and these are meant to be read at a glance like a gif rather than watched. Anything you would otherwise have heard is shown as a small icon instead: a verbal cue being given, a hand signal, a noise being made, a treat being delivered, a duration being held, a distance being walked.

Often confused with

The video being your dog. It is a demonstration, filmed with a dog who already knows the step. Your first attempt will not look like it, and it is not supposed to.

The small Treats chip above the video. Tap it and you can set the value of what you are paying your dog with: Low, Medium or High.

It does not change the training. It records it. That matters more than it sounds, because treat value is one of the few things that reliably explains why a set went well or badly, and it is the first thing worth changing when a step keeps sticking. A step that fails on kibble and passes on chicken was never too hard, it was underpaid.

The value you set stays for the rest of the session unless you change it. You can change it mid-session, and that change is recorded where it happened, so a step that turned around the moment you switched to cheese shows up as exactly that.

Which food counts as which value is your dog's opinion, not the packet's, and the whole ladder shifts down as the environment gets harder: the biscuit that works in your kitchen may be worth nothing in a car park. See Treats.

Because it is recorded, Coach can see it, including when you change value partway through a session and whether it made any difference on that step.

Often confused with

A setting you have to get right. There is no wrong answer and nothing is withheld from your dog based on it. If you are not sure, set it to medium.

The camera button on the right of the step details records a ten-second clip of the rep you are about to do, and attaches it to the session for Coach to look at afterwards.

Use it when something is going wrong that you cannot describe. Mechanics problems are almost invisible from the inside and obvious on film: a lure held too high, a marker arriving a beat after the behavior, a treat delivered somewhere that pulls your dog out of position. Ten seconds of the rep that keeps failing is worth more than a paragraph about it.

You do not have to use the button. You can film your dog however you normally would and send Coach the clip in the chat afterwards, which is the better option when what you want looked at happened outside a session, or ran longer than ten seconds.

Either way, film is the way to get a second opinion on body language. What an owner reads as stubbornness is frequently a dog telling you they are uncomfortable, and that shows on camera. See Stress Signals.

Scroll up on the step details and the plan opens out ahead of you: the steps that come after this one, in order.

This is worth a look when you are wondering where a plan is going, or whether the thing you actually care about is three steps away or thirty. It is also where the advanced controls live (see The Manual Buttons).

Steps you have not reached yet are shown for information. Seeing them does not skip them.

Often confused with

The whole plan. Split steps stay hidden in the app until your dog needs one, so the list you are looking at is the main path, not every rung that exists. The website shows all of them.

Scroll down on the step details and you get this session's history: the steps you have already worked, newest first, each marked with what the app did at the end of it.

It is there for two practical jobs: jumping back to a step you have already done, and checking the tally of a step when you cannot see why the app decided what it decided. A set that felt fine but shows three Xs explains a drop immediately.

It is not the place to judge the session as a whole. For that, wait for the end and look at the chart, which is built for exactly that question.

Swipe any step in those lists sideways. Swipe right to view it, swipe left to jump to it. This works the same on the next steps and on the previous ones.

View opens the step on its own page, with its setup, instructions, criteria and demo video, and nothing moves in your session. Tap back to return to the Player, or jump to the step from there if you decide you want it.

View mode is the same page as Preview Steps on the plan info page, which means you can scroll up and down through the rest of the plan from inside it. That makes it a third route to a split step without leaving a session: view any step, scroll to the split you want, jump to it.

Jump moves the session to that step, forward or back. It is a manual move, so read the next entry first.

Proof steps are not listed in a plan while you are training it normally. To see them, choose the Proof option in the menu at the top of the Player first, then scroll up over the step description to reveal the Next Steps of the plan in proof mode. Scrolling the other way over the same panel shows the steps you have already worked, if there are any.

That is currently the only route to them in the app. Splits are different: those you can see and jump to from the plan info page. The website lists every step of a plan, proof steps included.

At the top of Next Steps are four buttons: PUSH, DROP, STICK and SPLIT. They do by hand what the app normally does for you at the end of a set.

They exist because a person in the room sometimes has information the engine does not have. The honest rule is this:

Override on information, never on feeling.

Information looks like: your dog demonstrably already owns this step, learned before you ever opened the app, and walking the ladder from the bottom wastes both your time. Or you can see with your own eyes that the next step is too big a jump for this dog, before the push-drop-push-drop pattern has had time to prove it. Discretionary splitting or sticking is the most defensible use of these buttons, and the one experienced trainers reach for most.

Feeling looks like: a drop feels like failure, so you push instead. Or the session is dragging and you want to be further along. That override costs you the thing that makes the app work, because every decision after it is built on a difficulty level your dog never earned.

Two practical notes. A manual move is recorded as manual, so it shows up as itself in your history and Coach can see it, which is a feature rather than a telling-off. And if you are unsure, the app's own answer is usually right: it is not guessing, it is counting.

Often confused with

Fixing a step that is too hard. A step that keeps failing does not need a manual push, it needs a smaller rung, better treats, or an easier room. See Splitting and Lumping.

A proofing game runs in the same Player, with things deliberately taken away.

There are no next steps, no session history and no manual buttons. That is not an omission. A game is not a ladder: nothing is ahead of you to jump to, nothing is behind you to fall back to, and there is no difficulty to override. The app has shuffled goals your dog already earned and is asking for them in an order nobody can predict.

Where the demo video normally sits you get the goals in play, one row each, with the marks you have given so far. The small badge on each row tells you which kind of goal is being asked for: a hand signal, a spoken cue, the same behavior at distance or for duration, and so on. The rows reorder themselves each time the app runs through them, which is the whole point of a game made visible. Tap the play button to swap the list back to the demo videos.

The treat value chip and the clip recorder work exactly as they do in a plan.

What is at stake is your goals page. Goals your dog nails stay green, goals they miss turn blue for review, and blue means review rather than lost. See Goal Step.

Often confused with

A test. A blue goal is not a failure, it is the game doing the job you started it for: it just found the cue that was leaning on context rather than standing on its own.

The menu button to the left of the plan name at the top of the Player holds three things:

• Finish Session — ends the session and saves it. Use it while your dog is still keen rather than when they have run out. See Session.
• Restart Plan — begins the plan again from the start.
• Proof — runs the plan in proofing mode, which is also the only way to see its proof steps.

When you finish a session the app shows you a chart of it, and it is worth ten seconds of your attention before you close it.

The line is the session, drawn rep by rep, and each stretch of it is coloured by what the app decided at the end of that set. Green is a push, so a climbing green line is your dog earning their way up the plan. Dark blue is a drop, light blue is a stick and yellow is a split. Those are the same four colours the app uses everywhere, which is why split steps show up tinted yellow in a plan's step list.

Tap or hold anywhere on the line and it tells you which step that stretch was, and how the reps went: the checks and Xs in the order you gave them. That is the quickest way to find the set where a session turned.

How the line is drawn is worth knowing, because it explains the shapes. It moves one place to the right for every rep, always by the same amount, so the horizontal axis is simply how much training you did. It moves up when you tap the check and down when you tap the X, and how far it moves depends on how long that rep took. What you are looking at is a trend, not a score.

Two honest caveats. If you are slow with the buttons, tapping a while after the rep actually finished, the line exaggerates: long reps move it further. And on a Shaping step that is adding a verbal cue, responding to the hand signal counts as a fail, which is the whole point of that step, so those sessions draw a long downward line while your dog is doing exactly what is expected of them. A bleak-looking chart on a cue-adding step is normal. We may find a better way to draw it one day.

The circled badges on the line are goal steps. A goal badge is green when the most recent time your dog was asked for it they pushed, and it turns blue when they have since dropped or stuck on it, in a plan or in a game. Blue means review, not lost.

Around the line are the session's numbers: how long it ran, your rate of reinforcement in treats per minute, how many goals were earned, and a chip for each goal now needing review.

The chart is meant to be shared. Customize lets you pick which number is featured and change the card's background colour, and Share sends the image wherever you like. Closing it puts you back on the plan info page.

You do not have to keep it. Every chart is saved: the recent ones sit on the home page, and View more opens the full history for every plan, so you can pull up any session you have ever run.

Often confused with

A score. A tidy climbing line is not a better session than a jagged one. A jagged line is the engine finding the edge of what your dog can do, which is what you started the session for.

The menu button on the right of the top bar turns three things on and off.

Haptics is a small vibration when you record a rep. Feedback for you, not for your dog.

Click plays a sound when you tap the check. The sound fires the instant your finger lands, not when it lifts, because on test that half-second of delay was too slow to be useful.

This one is not cosmetic. If you tap the check at the moment your dog does the behavior, that sound is a marker, and marker timing is what makes it worth having. If you tap it once your dog has finished, sat back down and looked away, the sound marks looking away. So either tap at the moment, or turn it off and mark with your voice, and record the rep a second later.

It is a fairly quiet click. If your dog is sound-sensitive, turn your phone's volume down rather than turning the feature off, and see Clicker.

Listen is in beta. It listens for a real clicker and records the rep when it hears one, which is lovely when it works, and at the moment it does not work reliably enough to train on. Try it if you are curious and tell us what happened. Do not depend on it for a session that matters.