WTR Watch

Getting started

To get started, open the app by pressing the app icon on your device’s applications screen. Once the app is opened, you will be presented with a login page directing you to login to your WhosTheRef account; this is needed if you wish to sync your game data to WhosTheRef. If you do not have a WhosTheRef account, or do not wish to link the one you have, you may press ‘Continue without Login’. Bear in mind some features will not be available to you if you do not login to your WhosTheRef account.

After this screen, you will be shown a selection of sports that our app supports, for the purposes of this user guide we will be selecting Rugby Union as our sport.

Once Rugby Union is selected, the icon will change to signify your selection and the continue button will change colour. Press ‘Continue’ to take you to the main Rugby Union screen.

This will open the main screen for the Rugby Union app. Breaking down the sections, we have:

A. Continuous timer

B. Main timer

C. Penalty Ratio Bar

D. Game Event History Bar

E. Settings Button

F. Add Note Button

Before we start the game, we need to make sure that the game is setup correctly, to do this press the settings button to bring up the settings popup.

Inside the settings popup you can change how the game will run on the app.

The ‘Match Settings’ tab contains the variables that pertain to a specific game (e.g. Period Length, Yellow Card Length etc.).

The ‘App Settings’ tab contains more generalised settings not directly related to the game, such as whether to use team abbreviations or the direction of the timer.

‘Previous Games’ contains records of all the games that you have managed, you are able to view the details of each game in this tab.

‘Settings Presets’ contains the settings set up that you choose, every time you make a change to your settings, they will be saved to the currently selected settings preset.

If you want to have more than one setting preset, you can create a new set from this tab (if you do create a new preset and close the app, the settings will default to ‘Default Rugby Union’ when you re-open the app.).

‘About’ has details of the app, alongside buttons for logging out of your account and exiting the app. If you log out or exit the app whilst a game is running all unsaved data will be deleted so, ensure you are sure you want to leave before exiting.

Two of the main features you are likely to change on this screen are the team names and the team colours.

To change the team names, simply tap into the ‘Home’ or ‘Away’ text boxes and type in the team’s name. This will be automatically saved once you type the name.

To change the team colours, press the ‘Choose team colours’ button. This will bring up the colour picker.

To change one team’s colour, select the team at the top you want to change and use your finger to select the colour you want on the wheel. You can adjust the brightness of the colour with the lower bar. If the colour you have selected is dark, the text on the buttons will automatically change to white to improve readability. You may also select a colour from a pre-selected list using the colour palette just below the lower bar.

Now that your game is properly configured, we are ready to start the game.

Using the main page

Once the sport screen is opened you will be presented with the main screen for the Rugby Union app. The ‘header’ area contains the timers, ‘Start & Pause’ timer buttons, the ‘End Period’ button, the score, team names, as well as the penalty ratio bar.

The bulk of the page is filled with action buttons that are used to document events in game. For the purposes of this user guide, we will be using the default settings but note that yours may look different depending on the app settings you have selected.

Before the game has started, all the buttons in the main section are greyed out. This is to signify that they are not able to be pressed. To add any of these events the game must have started.

To start the game, press the ‘Start 1st Half’ button in the top left of the screen.

Once the game has started you will see that the main buttons have changed colour corresponding to their team colour. This is to help differentiate the side with that button applies to.

To add an event to a team, let’s say for example a ‘Drop Goal’ to the home team, press the drop goal button on the home side of the screen.

Once this is pressed, the score will change, and an event card will be created at the bottom of the screen. You can use these cards to view, edit, or delete events as necessary.

When you need to pause the timer, simply press the ‘Pause Timer’ button in the top left. This will change the display of the app to signify that the timer is paused, main buttons are disabled whilst the timer is paused and the timer/start timer buttons will slowly flash red. (Note that the continuous timer will run while the main timer is paused.)

For most events you will need to indicate a reason for that event, whether it is for a penalty, a free kick, or the type of escalation. To do this a popup will appear with the appropriate options for the given event. Using the example of a penalty, pressing the penalty button will show this popup.

In order to create the Penalty event, you will need to select the type of penalty being created and then the reason, if known. For this example, the penalty is a ‘Line-out’ and the reason is ‘Pulling down’.

Pressing the reason will close the popup and create the penalty event.

Notice the penalty and free kick buttons have changed to 3 buttons. This is the interaction for penalty kicks. If the team does go for a ‘kick at goal’, the buttons will change a second time to show the penalty kick timer and 2 options for either making the goal or missing. If the team does not go for a ‘kick at goal’ then you can ‘clear’ the buttons and revert them back to normal. In this example, the team goes for a kick at goal and misses.

As stated previously, most interactions will involve a popup asking you for more information. They will appear in the same fashion as this example; however, some events do not require a popup, but will need you to press a secondary button to add the event to the game timeline.

To add a try, the user must first press the try button. When this is done the buttons are replaced with 3 boxes, ‘Conv’, the conversion timer, and ‘No Conv’. The conversion timer will tick up if the main timer is active and will pause if the timer is paused. If the timer goes over the allotted time, it will change colour to red (or pink if the team colour is red).

Pressing either ‘Conv’ or ‘No Conv’ will return the buttons to normal and create the associated events; for this example, the team made the try but not the conversion.

You can see that 2 separate events have been made for the try and no conversion, this is for 2 reasons. Firstly, it allows the user to change the conversion type if needed, and secondly, it makes filtering the timeline simpler for the user by allowing them to remove all non-scoring events if necessary.

Now that we have a small selection of events, let’s view and edit them.

Viewing and editing events

To view and edit events for the current game, you need to find the event you want to edit in the ‘Event History’ bar. Once the event is found, pressing the card will bring up an interface to view the event in more detail.

In this example we will be viewing a penalty.

We can see the team’s name (Home), event type (Penalty), reason (Pulling Down), and the timestamp (2’) in the subtitle of the popup. This acts as a shorthand description of what the event contains and helps you to see if you are in the correct event.

Penalty events have a couple extra features that most events do not have, namely the ability to add cards (both yellow and red) as well as changing the reason for the penalty. Sometimes when recording a game, you may not know the exact reason for a penalty, or any other event that requires them, so having the ability to change the reason after the fact (perhaps after more information has come to light) is invaluable.

To add a card, simply press the corresponding colour and it will be added to the event timeline. If a yellow card is added, it will add a timer for the card as well that counts down when the main timer is active.

When a yellow card is active, a yellow card with a timer is placed at the top of the screen. When the timer has expired, this timer will be removed but the card will remain at the top as a visual reminder of how many cards that team has been given.

Many events have little unique interactions that augment how you use them, for the most part all events can be deleted or their team side swapped in case you make a mistake.

One exception to being deleted are the ‘conversions’ & ‘no conversions’, these can only be deleted alongside their associated ‘try’. If you need to change the type from one to the other, there is a button to toggle the conversion type when viewing a conversion/no conversion event.

Using the timeline

When you are adding events during the game, you may find it useful to view a timeline of the game to make sure that events are being recorded correctly (or to settle disputes with others around you). To access the live timeline, press the penalty ratio bar.

Pressing the red and blue bar just below the score will bring up the timeline popup, showing the timeline for the current game.

The timeline has 2 views that show different aspects of the game’s events. We will start with the first view.

You will notice that the timeline starts at the bottom, and most recent, events. To access the filters there is a button in the bottom left called ‘Go to Top’; pressing this will take you to the top of the scrollable area.

There are a series of filters at the top of the page that correspond to different events that can exist in the game. Some events, such as tries, conversions, drop goals etc. have been lumped together under ‘Score’. To view just one type of event, such as score, you can double tap or press and hold the score button and it will remove all but that type of event.

To revert this, press the see all filter button on the left. Pressing ‘Switch View’ at the top right of the screen will show the table view of the timeline.

This view is intended as a more descriptive and digestible view for Penalties, Free Kicks, Lineouts, and Scrums. It shows the number of events per quarter paired with the reasons behind the event.

Ending a game

Once the game has progressed to the end of the periods, you will press the End Game button and confirm the alert to finish the game.

Doing this, you will be presented with this popup.

The popup shows the time the game ended (14:08), the 2 teams names and the score, as well as key stats for each side.

Below these stats, there are a series of buttons that allow you to save, sync, and view the game data in in a variety of methods.

Pressing ‘Export Game as PDF’ will generate a PDF record of the game, with events in chronological order including any notes that were added.

Pressing ‘Export Game as Text’ will generate a similar chronological record of the game in text form. This includes the internal data for the events and a saved version of the stats breakdown shown on the end game popup.

‘Export Game as HTML’ saves the game timeline you can see by pressing the penalty ratio bar as an HTML file. Opening this file on desktop will recreate the interactable timeline that the app offers.

‘[DEBUG] Export Game as JSON’ is a developer button presently, however this will function as the sync data button in the future if the user is logged into their WhosTheRef account. Pressing this button will create an unprocessed string of data in a similar way the ‘Export Game as Text’ button does.

After you have created as many, or as few, records of the game as you would like, pressing the ‘Save and New Game’ button will save the game data to your device and reset the app for the next game.

Reviewing previous games

As mentioned before, once a game is complete you are presented a button called ‘Save and New Game’. Pressing this button saves a copy of the game timeline to the device and resets the app for the next game. Those saved games can be accessed through the settings popup.

Going to the ‘Previous Games’ tab on the settings popup will show you a list of all of your previously saved games labelled with the team names, as well as the date and time of the game. (Note that the team names here are all ‘Home’ and ‘Away’ as they are the default names).

Pressing any one of these records will present the timeline view in the same fashion as pressing the penalty ratio bar on a live game; with the additional features of being able to create the same outputs (HTML document, PDF, Text file, and sync) as if you had just finished the game.

Settings Page Options

The settings page contains many different options that you can use to customise and personalise your app to tailor it to your specific needs, we encourage you to try out these options to see what works best for you.

First, let’s go through the ‘Match Settings’ tab.

Pressing the ‘Switch Teams Around’ button will switch the position of the home and away columns. This can be useful for half time as it allows you to maintain the same position and keep the teams on the correct side of the app.

As mentioned previously, the home and away team names can be set by typing inside the text boxes. Changing the team colours can be done by pressing the ‘Choose team colours’ button and selecting a colour from the wheel or one of the preset colours.

Location and Competition can be filled out here as well to add this data to the game record and sync the data to WhosTheRef if the user is logged in in a future update.

You can change the date and time of the game you are managing. By changing the starting time into the future, you will see a countdown to the start of the game replace the main timer. This is to give you a measure as to how long until the game is supposed to start.

Below these match details are the game variables, these contain the different values that you may want to change about the game specifically.

There are 3 presets at the top of the list that are guides to the values that you would want to use for that version of Rugby Union, however you are able to change any of these to what you need.

Below this, the officials associated with the game are listed. Here you can fill in the details for any of the officials who are present at the game. These will appear on the PDF output of the game.

The next tab is the ‘App Settings’. This tab contains the settings that change the app’s function, display, or button layout. The below image shows the default settings configuration.

Ticking ‘Use Team Abbreviations’ adds 2 additional text boxes on the ‘Match Settings’ tab for the home and away team abbreviations. These abbreviations are limited to 4 characters and replace the team’s name at the top of the page and in the events bar at the bottom of the screen.

‘Show countdown timer’ is a toggle for showing the kick off timer before the start of a game.

‘Show player stats in Report’ is a toggle that, when active, prints out the player information for each of the events if the user has enabled player number inputs.

‘Mirror columns’ allows the user to mirror the buttons along the central divide. Some users prefer to have the buttons mirrored as it makes the more frequently used buttons position themselves on the outside of the screen, making them easier to press.

‘Add player numbers to events’ is a new feature that allows the user to add player numbers to events. This is not implemented fully; however, it does allow you to input numbers for trys, conversions, free kicks, and penalties.

‘Add Front & Rear positions to Lineouts’ allows you to add a position type to the lineouts.

‘Record Advantage’ allows you to record advantage during the game, with the secondary option of ‘Recording Advantage Detail’ to add extra detail to the advantage event.

You can change the direction of the timer with the ‘Timer direction up’ toggle, by default the timer goes up from 00:00 to 40:00, however some users may prefer the timer to count down to 00:00 instead.

If the timer direction is going up, there is a secondary option for ‘Full Time Counter’. This option allows the timer to no reset between periods (e.g. First half is 00:00 -> 40:00; second half is 40:00 -> 80:00).

The final setting listed in ‘App Settings’ is penalty assignment, this refers to which team is given the penalty (whether it is the one who committed the offence, or the one to whom the offence was committed). There is an explanatory sentence below the setting to clarify the option you have chosen.

Penalty Assignment

By default the penalty assignment is awarded to the team for whom the penalty was committed, so the sentence reads “Penalty for team home, penalty goal available to team home’. We found that in our testing referees and officials have different options on which way this assignment should go, so we give you the choice to choose what makes most sense to you or your organisation.