Waterline
An indoor rowing game. On Android now, iPhone and iPad next.
An indoor rowing game. On Android now, iPhone and iPad next.
Connect your rowing machine over Bluetooth and your strokes drive a single scull down a river. Pull harder and it runs faster; stop and it glides, then settles.
Each route is a closed loop with one timing gate, so you are never stopped by a finish line. Row a single lap or keep going for an hour. Laps are timed as you pass the gate and the best one is kept per route, along with your time for each 500 m section.
The channel is buoyed at eleven metres either side, with boards counting off every 250 m, so you always know where you are without reading the screen. The sound is a real river recording with birds and wind over it, plus the catch of the blades, the spray off the bow and the wake behind you.
Set a target anywhere from 3:00 to 1:30 per 500 m, in five second steps. The pace boat holds it exactly and you race it, with the gap in metres on the progress bar.
The coach does something different. It sits at your shoulder and talks, so you hold the pace instead of chasing a hull.
You can also row with nobody there at all. The timers stay, the company goes.
“You’re nine seconds up. Ease it back to target.”
Warm-up, efforts, recoveries, cool-down. Each phase takes its own pace and stroke rate target, the way training plans actually prescribe them, and your sessions are saved on the device next to the three that ship with it.
While you row, the banner carries the current target, its countdown, what comes next and how much of the whole session is left. Every transition chimes, pitched up going into work and down coming out of it, so you do not have to watch for it. At the end each effort is scored against what it was meant to be.
Tap ROW ONLINE and you are on your route with everyone else who is out on it. There is no lobby, no join code and no countdown. The routes are loops, so you spawn at your own distance and people arrive and leave without interrupting anyone's piece.
A panel lists the ten nearest rowers by name, with the gap along the loop and the pace they are holding. Everyone appears in the boat livery, hull and kit colours they picked. The button tells you how many are out there before you commit, and it counts real rowers separately from pace boats, so an empty river says it is empty rather than pretending.
Pace boats are always out on the routes, listed by name and current split before you pick one, so a quiet river still gives you something to reel in. Choose one and you start just off its stern.
One of them rows intervals rather than a steady pace, and the list says where in the set it has got to: effort three of six, seventy seconds left, eighteen minutes into thirty-eight. Chase it and its session takes over your banner, chimes included. It is a way to row a structured piece without writing one.
Nothing is filtered out of the device list. Every Bluetooth device the phone can see is shown, tagged with what it looks like, and the one you used last is at the top. A name filter once hid a real machine for an entire release, which is why a label can no longer lock anyone out of their own hardware.
Your machine and your strap are both remembered and reconnect on their own the next time you open the app. On a Concept2 the monitor's own figures are treated as authoritative rather than being recalculated.
Works with FTMS rowing machines, Concept2 monitors, FTMS bikes, cycling power meters and Bluetooth heart rate straps. Written and tested on a WaterRower; the Concept2 protocol is implemented from its published interface. No machine? Every mode falls back to simulated rowing so you can look around the routes first. Those rows are kept out of your stats.
Split, average split, stroke rate, power, distance, time, strokes, heart rate and energy. Pick any six, in whatever order you want, with one of them starred as the big card. The layout is edited while you are rowing, not buried in a settings page you visit once.
Afterwards you get the piece back as a card: time, average split, rate, power, strokes, every 500 m section with its personal best marked, and each interval scored against its target. If you want it in Strava, one tap on that card sends it.
Sixteen real rowing colours, Oxford and Cambridge blue, Leander cerise, Empacher yellow, Washington purple among them, across the deck, the sheer stripe, the blade faces and the hull. Then the rower: male or female, eleven hair shades, kit in whatever your club wears. It is applied live behind the menu, remembered, and everyone you row with online sees it.
Every button on every one of those pages is written up in the guide.
Most of that list started as an email from someone who rows. If something is missing, tell me and it stands a good chance of being in the next build.
Waterline takes nearly all of my time now, but these two are still on the Play Store and still get fixes.
Air traffic control as a puzzle rather than a reflex test. You sequence arrivals and departures a turn at a time, working around runway closures, weather and the occasional go-around or gear fault. Every board it deals you can be solved; the generator will not hand you a dead end.
On Google Play →A Texas BBQ trailer. Smoke the brisket overnight, set the menu and the prices in the morning, then work the lunch rush in real time and find out what you got wrong. Keep at it long enough and you can trade the truck for a building.
On Google Play →nchanted is one person in Belgium. I write the code, build the routes and test everything on my own rowing machine before it goes out. The art is not mine: the rower models, the sky, the shoreline props and the river recordings are other people's work, licensed and credited in the app.
Waterline is free because getting into rowing is expensive enough already, and because the machine you own is only worth anything if you actually use it. If this makes that easier, or makes someone fitter than they were, it has done its job. Whatever the next build gets, it gets because someone rowed with this and told me what was wrong with it.
Every route, every mode and the online river are there from the first launch. No subscription, no ads, no route packs.
It is on Android today. The iOS version already rows on an iPad with a real machine and strap connected, but it is not finished and I would rather ship it late than ship it stuttering. Ask me to tell you when it lands.