New Feature: Waypoint Management

Video Summary

In this video, Polish Pete from Omnia Fishing's headquarters in Golden Valley, Minnesota, teams up with CTO Dan Wick to discuss the latest Pro features. They dive deep into the exciting new waypoint management system, which includes various mapping technologies and user-friendly ways to create, edit, and share waypoints. Dan explains how anglers can manually set waypoints, use the auto mode for on-the-water convenience, and leverage powerful filtering and editing capabilities. They also highlight upcoming features like mass importing and exporting waypoints to and from boat units. Watch to learn how these innovative tools can enhance your fishing experience and stay tuned for more updates!

Video Transcript

Polish Pete: What's up everybody, it's Polish Pete. I'm here in our headquarters in Golden Valley, Minnesota. I'm joined once again by my good friend and the CTO of Omnia Fishing, Dan Wick.

Dan Wick: And as promised, more features have been rolling out on Pro. If you're not aware yet, I don't know what rock you've been living under, but we've been talking about it a lot. There are a lot of different mapping features. There's a whole bunch of layers to Pro here, no pun intended. But clearly, we're giving you all the advantages we possibly can on and off the water to help you be more effective on the water.

We've rolled out a whole bunch of different mapping technologies so far. The thing I'm most excited about has been waypoints and waypoint management. I currently think there's a big gap in that out there in the marketplace. So Dan and his team have been working on our waypoint features with Omnia Pro, and I'm excited to announce that it's cooking now. Well, I shouldn't just, it's still cooking a lot. It's not baked, it's still cooking, but there's a product out there already that's fun to play with. And all of you have already found it, actually. Lots and lots of waypoints have been created already. And now we're going to get into some details on how to use some of this and some of the stuff that's coming.

Polish Pete: So I'm going to start off with the fact that there are a couple of different ways to create a waypoint now. How do we go about that, Dan?

Dan Wick: Yeah, yeah. So any app, and what's cool about waypoints is that you have to have an account but you don't necessarily have to be Pro. There are benefits of being Pro for waypoints, but we'll cover that later. So all you have to do is have an account and be signed in. When you're signed in on the lower left, there's an icon for waypoints. If you open that up, you'll see that any waypoints you create will be showing there.

To create a waypoint, all you have to do is long press on any point in the map that you want. After you create the waypoint, you can still drag it and move it around to reposition it. Then you can fill out the details as much as you want. Most of these details are optional, so you can say the waypoint name. It automatically detects what water body you're on. It timestamps it, gives you the literal latitude and longitude automatically. You can choose the type, so the marker, the fish, the structure, the great spot, the hazard. You can also input any notes you want there. So you can create these pretty quickly that way. Manually finding a spot on the map and zooming in if you're on the water and you want to reposition it. This long press is the shortcut to doing that. After you're done, all your waypoints show up in the lower left in the list. So that's kind of the manual way to do it.

Polish Pete: Gotcha, but what if I'm on the water and I'm on a good spot and I want to create a waypoint?

Dan Wick: Yes, so this is something that we had a lot of requests for from people on the water. As you know, your phones, when you have the location feature turned on, which you should for Omnia because it helps find everything out, we don't use it for marketing, we just use it to make sure we know where you're at on the water. There is now on the lower right, an orange button that is a waypoint auto mode. So what you can do is, as you're out there and you maybe have your phone in one hand, every time you hit that waypoint shortcut in the lower right, it creates a waypoint based on where you're at.

Polish Pete: One of the things I'm most excited about this, right, is it's always been difficult for me retroactively to go back and get off the water and kind of catalog what my day was and filter and edit these waypoints. What now filtering and editing capabilities do we have for waypoints?

Dan Wick: Yep, and one thing that's cool about the auto mode if you're on the water, stamping out a few dozen of these, just to remind everybody, if you have an Omnia account and if you're Pro, but in this case for waypoint, if you have an account, you can go to the desktop. You can sit down on desktop and pull them off, it's on a nice big screen, you can see in there. You can definitely go back and do that if that's more efficient for you, and you can make adjustments if you want. So that is one workflow we are pretty excited about. You can use the app to auto-drop a bunch of things and then go back, but you also could go back and edit them so in half as well. There are filters, so if you created a few dozen of these, the same things that you entered as your details, you can now reverse that and say, I want just the waypoints that I dropped for a specific lake, you can filter it by the water, or the waypoint type, you know, the marker, the hazard, or the great spot, etc. You can also scope it by the range.

Polish Pete: So stupid question, but will the waypoint know what lake it's on when you create it?

Dan Wick: Yep, it does, so it automatically knows what lake you're on. That’s a pretty nice feature in terms of rounding up the whole waypoint management feature. Pretty excited about that, being able to automate, you know, understanding where you're at.

Polish Pete: So I'm able to actually just look at my Minnetonka waypoints if I just want to look at Minnetonka.

Dan Wick: Yeah, and you can scope it to a date, you can scope it to a type, and all that stuff. So on the map, as you're creating these filters, it would then show you just the waypoints that you created based on your criteria. Then you can edit, and again, I really encourage people, if you have a whole bunch of these and you want to clean them up, go into your desktop and sit down to do it. It's really nice.

Polish Pete: Yeah, and that's what I look forward to. We get a little downtime here in Minnesota, not on the water, and it'd be great to be able to go in and edit and filter and play with this stuff. Now, that leads me to a question. I know all this is extremely private. We take a lot of pride in that, by the way, your stuff's going to be protected, it’d be very private, it's just yours. But what if, in the case of, I wanted some dots from a friend of mine, or if I wanted to share them with somebody, a family member or a friend or a tournament buddy that's going to a body of water that I've had experience on, since I can easily filter and edit my waypoints now. How can I share them with somebody?

Dan Wick: Yeah, so any waypoint you have now, we turn on the ability, all you have to do is find the waypoint you want to share, and then there's a button in the middle that says share. So what that will do then is open up the ability for you to take that URL for the waypoint and share it via text, or any other messaging tools that you have on your phone. So when that recipient gets it, it'll open up a web version of it, or download the app depending on what you want to do, so then they can see that waypoint. And again, that's a very one-to-one thing. It's not a guessable thing that people can find. So as you're sharing it with people, they'll be able to see it, and then they can save it to their account too, if they want to.

Polish Pete: So it's on them to be safe with that thing, let's say get it. So you only send them to people you trust, you all know how that works already. But I'm really excited about that feature personally. So that leads me to some of the future things coming down the road that I'm very excited about. Importing these waypoints into my unit, maybe in mass, or exporting them in mass. If I get to spend the winter playing with this, and really refining how I want my waypoints to be on my physical units in my boat, are we going to have that capability soon to be able to mass export and import waypoints?

Dan Wick: Yeah, so we're in final testing of the idea of being able to import waypoints from one of your devices. If you export it from one of your in-dash units, we now have the ability for you to import those. And then also the reverse of that, the ability to export. So we're in final testing for both of those features. We’ve identified the three big guys in the space for the in-dash units. We're going to support those. Exporting also will be in a standardized format that should allow you to import those in there. So the full round trip would be there. And one of the big things, 'cause this is waypoint management, it's just a waypoint tool, is that if you imported those, when this is available, when you import those waypoints, it'll auto detect the lake that they were put onto. So that's coming soon. (laughing) We're still in final testing on that, we just want to make sure it works seamlessly, but that's a feature that's coming soon.

Polish Pete: Well, I'm not sure you guys could tell just by my reaction in this video, but this has been probably the number one thing I've been talking about since we dove into this part of the business here at Omnia Fishing, and I'm really excited about it. I struggle a lot with my management of my waypoints and just technology. I'm not a very technologically advanced angler. So this is all stuff that's going to help me out immensely. And I know my network of friends and all that are excited to see what this holds.

Already, right now, go ahead and play this. You just need to have an account at Omnia, you do not need to have Pro, but I'm going to tell you to unlock all the features. I'm not going to get into the super detail on this, but I've seen kind of the future of this and being able to overlay weather data and all that stuff with these waypoints. The value of it's going to be immeasurable. So get on board now, go play with the features that are currently available with waypoints and stay tuned, there's even more coming.