A field log for iPhone

A season is longer than you remember it.

Name: HuntFix Journal
Author: Scott

You remember the stag. You do not remember the four mornings before it, or which gully they were in, or that all of them were over by nine. HuntFix Journal keeps the whole book — the blank days included — then shows you what it actually adds up to, with the counts and the hours written beside every figure, and lets you ask Apple's on-device AI about your own season, so the next one starts from what happened rather than what you remember.

See how it works

iPhone, iOS 27 or later. Hunting and fishing. New Zealand species first. No account. Logging works with no reception at all.

On the App Store since 1 October 2026. Free to download, free for your first 7 days, then NZ$11.99 a year. Reading your record, exporting it and the iCloud backup stay free whatever happens.

What it doesLogs every outing — the blank days included — shows the arithmetic of the season with the counts and hours beside every figure, and answers questions about it with Apple's AI on your phone.

What it costsFree for your first 7 days, then NZ$11.99 a year. Your record, export and backup stay free whatever happens.

Where it is up toOn the App Store since 1 October 2026. Built for the field; a full season in the hills is still ahead of it.

What it needsiPhone, iOS 27 or later. No account. Logging needs no reception.

The other appHuntFix finds the animal you shot. Separate app, separate price; neither needs the other.

A panorama from a tussock ridge at sunrise, ranges running away in every direction, with a small orange tent pitched on the tops. — Twenty outings a year in country like this, and by April the only thing you can honestly say about any of it is what you wrote down at the time.

StartOne press of the Action button, or two taps. The outing is running before you have shut the truck door.

LogAdd, species, save. Under fifteen seconds, with the time, place, daylight and moon already filled in.

BlankNothing seen, nothing shot. Two taps, ten seconds — and it counts for exactly as much as the good days.

Look backIn April: counts, hours and outings, side by side — and Apple's on-device AI to ask about any of it. No verdict, no ranking, no forecast.

Most hunting logs only remember the good days

Which is why, after three seasons of using one, you still cannot answer the simplest question you have about your own hunting.

What you have now

A camera roll

Photographs of the animals you got, in date order, with no hours behind them and nothing at all from the days you came home empty. It is a highlight reel, and a highlight reel cannot be divided by anything.

What you have now

A trophy app

Most of the hunting logs on the store are built for the American market and built around the harvest. Enter the animal, enter the score. A day with no animal has nowhere to go, so it goes nowhere.

What this adds

The denominator

An outing is the unit here, not an animal. It has a start, a finish, a place and a list of what happened — which is sometimes nothing. Once the hours are in the book, a count becomes a rate, and a rate can be compared.

What the camera roll remembers

3 deer

No hours and no blank days, so nothing to divide by.

What the Journal remembers

3 deer in 41 h over 12 outings

Nine of them blank — which is what makes the three mean something.

The same season, kept two ways. An illustration, not anyone's real record.

What it looks like

Screens from the app, unretouched. The record in them is the fictional season the app is tested with — no real place, no real companion, no real outing — because a hunter's spots are the private thing here, mine included.

Head out

Two taps, or one press of the Action button, and the outing is running with the time, the place, the light and the moon already on it. The weather arrives when there is signal, and is a dash until it does.

The live outing card: Big game at Long Spur, Kowhai Downs, set off at 20:43; dark, 2 h 9 min after sunset, full moon 97% lit; rain, 2 to 7 degrees, 6 km/h; buttons for Add, Saw and Finish.

Species and a count. That is the form.

Big tiles, recent first, and the animal is on the record the moment you tap Save. Stag or hind if you want; a photograph or a note if you want. Under fifteen seconds, with gloves on.

The entry form for a red deer: a count stepper at 1, Stag and Hind buttons, and Photo, Library, Note and Video buttons, with Save at the bottom.

The blank days are in the book

Every outing in one list, the ones that produced nothing included, each with its hours. That list is what makes every figure on the next tab mean something.

The Log tab: the Head out and Quick blank buttons, a line saying the app is free until 2 October, and a list of outings with their places and hours.

Your record, on the ground

Entries as pins, spots as the circles they actually are, areas as labels. Filled is taken, hollow is seen. No heat map and nothing interpolated: every mark is a thing that was recorded.

The Map tab over hill country: pins coloured by species module at spots named Long Spur, Dry Creek and The Saddle in an area labelled Kowhai Downs, with a legend for taken, seen and both.

Counts, hours, outings — together, every time

What was taken and what was seen, in separate columns that are never added. A fish's size as smallest, middle and largest, with how many were measured. No means, no verdicts.

Insights, What: the record in numbers, 41 outings, 162 hours, 22 with nothing taken, 63 taken and 413 seen, then brown trout with taken, seen and outings columns and a length range from 8 measured.

When, by month, light and moon

A bar for each, with the count, the hours and the outings written under it, and too few to compare in those words wherever fewer than three outings stand behind a figure.

Insights, When, for big game by month: January and February greyed as too few to compare, March showing 1 taken and 13 seen in 15.5 hours over 3 outings.

Where, by area and then by spot

Ordered by what you saw per hour, with the count, hours and outings on every row and the ones standing on too little at the bottom. Tap through to the outings behind any row, blank days included.

Insights, Where: Tarn Block with 42 seen, 3 taken, 39.9 hours over 10 outings, and Kowhai Downs with 44 seen, 5 taken, 55.7 hours over 15 outings, each noting outings with no end time.

Ask about your own season

Apple's on-device model reads your record on the phone and answers from it, and from nothing else. Every figure in an answer comes from the record; where the record cannot answer, it says so. Nothing leaves the phone.

The Ask tab with Apple Intelligence selected and four suggested questions, such as how many deer have I taken this year and which spots have I hunted the most hours at.

Badges for what you logged as taken

A ladder across everything taken, a tile for the first of each species, and this year's milestones. Every one says what it was counted from, and sightings never count.

Badges: 63 logged as taken from 19 outings with something taken of 41 logged, the next rung Second Volume at 100 with 37 to go, and the ladder of rungs reached so far.

Your record is yours to take with you

A complete backup with the photographs in it, a spreadsheet, and waypoints for a map — free, never gated, and restorable on a new phone. There is no account to lose it with.

The Export screen: Backup (JSON), Spreadsheet (CSV) and Waypoints (GPX), a summary to copy for an AI, and Restore from a backup.

Who built it

I wanted the book kept properly.

I am Scott. I hunt and fish the South Island, and I also write software, which is a dangerous combination if you keep noticing the same missing thing.

I had years of photographs and no idea how many hours were behind any of them. I could not tell you whether Willy's Gully had actually been better than Creamcan or whether I just liked walking up it. The good days were all I had written down, so the only thing my record could prove was that I sometimes got a deer.

So the blank days are the feature. Everything else in the app follows from making them cheap enough to log — two taps — and then refusing to hide them anywhere afterwards.

It is the companion to HuntFix, which is the other half of the same problem.

The developer sitting in tussock on a hillside under heavy cloud, a brew in one hand and a rangefinder in the other.

Outings, entries, conditions

Three things, and the whole app is built out of them. An outing is a day out. An entry is one thing, or one batch of the same thing. The conditions the phone works out for itself.

An outing may hold nothing, and that is the point. Start and finish times are the effort the rest is divided by. A day with no entries is a complete, finished record, and the app gives it the same room on the screen as any other.
Seen and taken are separate for good. Tap Saw for the mob on the far face and it goes in as a sighting — species and count. Sightings are never added to the bag, in any total, on any screen. Eleven deer seen on a blank day is a very different day from a blank day with none.
Daylight and the moon need no signal. Sunrise, sunset, civil twilight, the light phase, "49 min before sunrise", the moon phase and its illumination are worked out on the phone from the time and the place. The maths is checked against the United States Naval Observatory's published tables, in both hemispheres and across the daylight-saving boundary.
The weather is fetched, never waited for. Apple's WeatherKit gives the day's high and low, one word for the sky, and the wind. If there was no signal the outing says "—" and is complete without it. Nothing is ever back-filled from a guess.
Areas and spots are two levels, because your places are. Snowdon Station holds Willy's Gully and Creamcan Gully. Save an entry inside a spot and the app offers to file it there; one tap confirms.
Companions are a name and nothing else. No contacts, no phone numbers, no accounts. Enough to answer "how many outings with Brian this year", and not one field more.
Photographs stay with the entry, not in your camera roll. Up to six each, kept inside the app and mirrored to your own iCloud. A video stays where it is in Photos and the entry keeps a reference to it — and says so honestly if you later delete the clip.

What the form asks for

Species and a time. Everything else is optional.

Red deer or fallow. Hind or stag. That is very nearly the whole entry, and it is deliberate — every field the form does not have is a field you are not tapping past at four in the morning with cold hands.

Fish get length, weight, method and bait, because those are the things an angler actually wants back later. Nobody gets antler scores, plumage, weapon, or who pulled the trigger. The bag is the party's bag.

Six mallards is one entry with a count of six. Three trout of different lengths can be expanded into three, each with its own measurement, at the same time and place. The totals come out the same either way.

A hunter kneeling in grey boulders beside a bull tahr, a turquoise tarn and a snow-streaked face behind them. — What one entry holds: the species, the sex, the count, the time, where the sun was at that moment, a photograph, and the spot the app proposed for it.

Honest by design

It shows you the arithmetic. It does not hand down a verdict.

One rule sits above every other in this app: never imply data that was not recorded. A logging app with an AI bolted to it is a machine for breaking that rule, so it is enforced in the maths rather than promised in the marketing.

Taken2 deerat Willy's Gully, this season

Hours12 hbehind that count

Outings5fewer than three and the cell goes grey

Every figure carries its denominator. "2 deer in 12 h over 5 outings", never "0.17 deer per hour". The counts, the hours and the number of outings are written beside the rate, every time, because the rate on its own tells you nothing about whether to believe it.
Fewer than three outings behind a cell and it goes grey. Labelled too few to compare, in those words. It is still there and you can still read it — the app is telling you what it is worth, not hiding it from you.
It will never tell you the best spot. Not "best", not "most productive", not "you should", not "hunt at". Those are claims about the country. The app only knows what you wrote down, and after a season of your own numbers you are far better placed to judge than it is.
No trend lines, no forecasts, no predictions. There is not a single line chart in the app. A missing month is absent from the chart, not drawn as a zero.
Unknown is a dash, never a zero. An outing with no weather says "—". A fish with no length says "—". A blank outing has zero entries, which is a recorded fact and a different thing entirely.
An unfinished outing contributes no hours at all. It is excluded from every rate rather than given a guessed end time, and the app reports how many it left out.

The same three spots. As bare rates, the one with two outings behind it wins. With the counts, hours and outings written beside each figure, it is the one the app greys out.

Every one of the three Insights screens carries the same line at the bottom: rates are your own record, not a forecast; counts and hours are shown so you can judge.

Ask Apple's AI about your own season

"Which spots have I not tried in the evening?" "How many blank days have I had?" "Compare Long Spur and Dry Creek." The Ask tab uses the AI already built into your iPhone to make sense of your own record — so you can plan the next hunt from what actually happened, with the judgement still yours. It answers from your log and from nothing else.

The default — built into your iPhone

Apple Intelligence, on this phone

Apple's on-device model, given tools that query your record directly rather than recalling it — so every number in an answer came out of the engine. It can summarise a season, compare two spots with the hours behind each, tell you what you have never tried, and notice a coincidence worth a question. Nothing leaves the phone, and there is nothing to set up. If your iPhone cannot run it, the tab says which of the three reasons it is and offers you the alternatives instead of hiding.

Five questions a week — nothing to set up

Claude

Pick Claude at the top of the Ask tab and Anthropic's model answers instead, with the whole shape of your season in front of it. No key, no account, nothing extra to pay — in the free week and with the subscription. You get five Claude questions a week, and the tab shows how many are left. It passes through a small relay of mine that checks the subscription or the free week and keeps nothing.

What is sent: the fact sheet — your totals and rates with the hours and outings behind them, your companion totals, your last ten outings, and your spot and area names. A second switch sends the full log, one line per outing. Coordinates and photographs are never sent, with either switch.

Your own tools, if you prefer

Copy it out

The same fact sheet can be copied straight out of the Ask tab and pasted into whatever you already use, with no data going anywhere you did not put it yourself. The CSV export does the same job for a spreadsheet, and export is free whatever you have paid.

The kind of answer it gives

Which spots on Snowdon haven't I tried in the evening?

Creamcan Gully: 6 outings, all started before 10 am — none in the evening.

Willy's Gully: 2 evening outings, 5 h, 4 seen, none taken. Too few to compare.

Creamcan has only ever been a morning spot for you. Is that deliberate?

every figure is from your record
hours and outings beside every count
it asks — it does not tell you where to go

An illustration of what the instructions allow, with made-up figures — not a captured screen.

What the answer is allowed to say

Both models get identical instructions. The honesty of an answer does not depend on which one you last picked.
It may notice and ask. It may not conclude. "Your last four blank outings were all in the afternoon — worth trying a dawn?" is allowed. "Hunt at dawn" is not. Neither is "because of the moon", and neither is anything about next weekend.
Then the app checks the answer before you see it. Every response is read for the things it is not allowed to say — a forbidden word, a figure that appears nowhere in your record — and anything found is shown to you underneath the answer. An answer the app itself distrusts says so out loud rather than being quietly passed on.
"The record can't answer that" is a permitted answer, and it is never treated as a failure.

Where you hunt goes to your iCloud, and nowhere else

Spots are the most sensitive thing in a hunting record. There is no account and no sign-up — your journal is mirrored to the private storage of the Apple Account already on your phone, which means I cannot read it and neither can anyone else.

No account, ever. Open it and use it. The backup uses the iCloud you are already signed in to.
No analytics of any kind. Not a count, not an event, not anonymised. There is no third-party code in the app at all.
Photographs never touch your photo library, so a hunting spot does not turn up in a shared album. They travel with the entry they belong to.
Coordinates and photographs never go to an AI. Spot names carry everything a model needs to reason with and none of the risk a latitude carries. Apple's on-device model sends nothing at all.
Settings tells you what actually happened rather than what was meant to — whether the backup really is running, and why not if it is not. There is no "last backed up" time, because iOS does not give the app a true one and a plausible guess would be worse than a dash.
Your record is exportable, forever, in three formats, whatever you have or have not paid for.

Read the full privacy policy →

What it costs

HuntFix Journal is free for your first 7 days, then NZ$11.99 a year. Whatever happens to the subscription, the record you have kept stays yours to read, export and back up.

NZ$11.99 a year

Annual subscription, through the App Store.

Free for your first 7 days

Outings, entries, sightings, photographs, spots, areas, companions — unlimited
Daylight, moon and light phase worked out on the phone; the day's weather when there is signal
The Map — your entries as pins, your spots as circles
Insights: What, When and Where, every figure with its counts, hours and outings
Ask — Apple's on-device AI with no limit, or Anthropic's Claude, included at no extra cost: five questions a week, the free week included
Siri, Shortcuts, the Action button and the Lock Screen Control
The New Zealand species pack, and any species you add in three taps

Free forever, whatever happens to the subscription: reading the record you have already kept, exporting it as JSON, CSV and GPX, and the iCloud backup. A lapse never hides, locks or deletes anything.

The free week is the app's, not a trial. It starts the day you first open the app and nothing is asked of you for seven days — no subscription, no sign-up, nothing to cancel. After that, heading out again needs the subscription, paid from the day it starts and renewing at NZ$11.99 a year unless you cancel. Cancel any time in the App Store; the subscription runs to the end of the period you have paid for.

The price in the app comes from the App Store in your own currency, so it is the one you will be charged. Full terms in the terms of use; what happens to your data is in the privacy policy.

If the free week or the subscription ends

An outing that is already running is never cut off. If it ends while you are out, you keep logging and finish the day as normal. The paywall only ever appears before a new outing — never inside one, never on the entry form, never at Finish. That is a rule rather than a preference.

Without a subscription the app becomes a reader. Every outing, entry and photograph stays exactly where it is and stays fully readable, export keeps working in all three formats, and the iCloud backup keeps running. Starting a new outing, adding entries, the Map, Insights and Ask wait until you subscribe again — and come back with your whole record already in them.

Download on the App Store

Where this is up to

HuntFix Journal is on the App Store, since 1 October 2026. The app is written and it runs: the maths engine passes 158 tests against the United States Naval Observatory's published almanac, a season can be logged, mapped, examined and exported, and a full backup has been proved to round-trip against a store of forty outings without losing a field or a photograph.

It has been on one phone since 14 September 2026, and the iCloud backup and the day's weather have both been proved there. What has not yet been proved is a whole season of it: the camera, the Action button and the field flow under real conditions. The free week and the price on this page are the model the app ships with.

And it has not spent a morning on a hill. Can an entry really be logged in under fifteen seconds, with gloves, in bad light? is a question only the country answers. If it falls short when you try it, say so — that is how it gets better.

Questions

Will it tell me the best time and place to hunt?

No, and it is built so that it cannot. It will not say "best", it will not rank a spot as productive, and there is no forecast anywhere in it. What it does is show you the arithmetic of your own record: two deer in twelve hours over five outings at one spot, one in fourteen hours at another, all three numbers written beside each other. That is a fact about what you did. Which of them means anything is your call — and after a season of your own data you are far better placed to make it than an app with eleven rows in a table.

Why would I log a day where I got nothing?

Because it is the most useful entry in the book, and nearly every hunting app throws it away. A rate is a count over the hours you actually put in. Log only the good days and the hours are wrong, every figure is inflated, and the app is flattering you rather than telling you anything. Quick blank is two taps and under ten seconds, because the honest thing has to be the cheap thing or nobody does it.

How long does it take to log something in the field?

Two taps to start an outing, or one press of the Action button or the Lock Screen Control. Two to four taps for a harvest — species, count if it is not one, sex if the species has one, Save — with the time, position, daylight and moon already filled in. Two or three taps for a sighting. One tap to finish. Nothing in that flow waits for the network, and no price or lock is ever shown during it.

What is the Claude option, and what does it cost?

The Ask tab runs on Apple's on-device model by default, and nothing leaves the phone. You can instead pick Anthropic's Claude at the top of the Ask tab, in the free week and with the subscription. There is no key to find and nothing extra to pay, and you get five Claude questions a week: five in the free week, then five in any seven days with the subscription. The question goes through a small relay of mine that checks the subscription or the free week, counts your questions and keeps nothing else, then to Anthropic. What is sent is the fact sheet — your totals and your rates with the hours and outings behind them, your companion totals, your last ten outings, and your spot and area names. A second switch sends the full log, one line per outing. Coordinates and photographs are never sent, with either switch. It is all set out on the privacy page.

Does it tell me the season dates and bag limits?

No, and it never will. There are no seasons, no bag limits, no licence requirements and no permit reminders anywhere in the app. Those things differ by region and change without notice, and an app that is wrong about one of them is worse than an app that never mentioned them. There is one optional free-text note per entry if you want to write your own licence number down. Knowing the rules where you are is yours.

My species is not in the list.

Add it — name, module, done, three taps, in the field, and it is a first-class species from then on. The New Zealand pack that ships is a starting point rather than a boundary, and it is the complete one: red deer through to crayfish, with the sex terms each species actually uses. Australia, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom get their own vocabulary — stag and hind or buck and doe, harvest or shot — and their species lists are still to come, so until they do, add what you shoot or catch and it is there for good.

Does it record whether I released the fish?

No, and that is on purpose. Kept or released, who took it, the antler detail, the plumage, the weapon — none of it is in the app. It is a record of what the party took, not a trophy sheet, and every field the form does not have is a field you are not tapping past in the dark.

What about tides?

Not in the app, and not in the schema either. It was left out deliberately: it needs a port table, a data source and a caveat about which of the two the app used, and leaving it out removes all three. It can be added later without disturbing anything else, so tell me if you would use it.

What does it cost?

Free for your first 7 days, then NZ$11.99 a year. Nothing is asked of you for the first week — no subscription, no sign-up, nothing to cancel — and I would rather say so here than have you find out at your first outing. After that, heading out again needs the subscription, which renews at NZ$11.99 a year unless you cancel in the App Store; there is no free trial on the subscription itself. Reading your record, exporting it and the iCloud backup stay free whatever you decide.

What if the free week or the subscription ends while I am out?

Nothing happens to the outing. One that is already running is never cut off: you keep logging and you finish it as normal. The paywall only ever appears before a new outing, never inside one — that is a rule rather than a preference, and it is the same rule HuntFix has about a live recovery.

Can I get my record out?

Three ways, all free and never gated. JSON is the complete backup — every outing, entry, spot, companion and photograph, byte for byte, and it restores. CSV is one row per entry plus a row for every outing that produced nothing, so the blank days are still in the denominator when you start summing. GPX gives you your spots and entries as waypoints for any mapping app. A lapsed subscription does not touch any of them.

Is it the same app as HuntFix?

No. They are two apps by the same person, with the same design language and the same rule about never claiming more than was measured, and they are bought and used separately. HuntFix marks where an animal fell and walks you back to it — one tense hour. HuntFix Journal keeps the book across a season. Owning one gives you nothing in the other, and neither needs the other to be useful. A one-way Log this harvest button between them is planned once both have shipped.

Is there an Android or Apple Watch version?

Android, no — I am an iPhone guy. Apple Watch is the feature this app most wants, because one tap to add a mallard with your hands full in a maimai is worth more than anything on the phone screen. It is a whole second app to build and test, so it waits until the phone version has done a season.

Two apps, one problem, different halves of it

Find it

HuntFix

You watched it drop on the far face. Sight it, type in the range from your rangefinder, and walk back to a fixed point an hour later.

Go to HuntFix →

Log it

HuntFix Journal

The season, kept honestly — outings, entries, sightings, blank days — and the arithmetic of it afterwards. You are here.