Hirt

About

Paper. Pocket. Pasture. The daily check used to mean printing a table of 230 animals, folding it into a pocket, and ticking them off on the walk until the list got soaked. For a customer on the Silberen Alp I replaced that with a small offline pocket app: no cloud, no constant internet, no heavyweight stack. The first version was Java and XML with a local SQLite database; the herd comes from an Excel/CSV export and syncs back to a laptop by file transfer.

Enter a four-digit ear-tag and the animal appears with its attributes, treatments and notes. The core is the attendance round: groups alphabetically, animals by tag, swipe left to mark present one animal or a whole group. Missed animals stay in the list and show red the next day. Reset is locked for 12 hours so a morning round cannot be wiped by accident.

Storage is a SQL schema, import and export are CSV/Excel, and an optional change log can be opened in Excel. The UI is built for older phones and dark early mornings. A local webapp handles laptop sync. The app is now being developed in React Native and scaled to other alpine farms. The screenshots below show the new version, the first Android version, and a few cows from the Silberen Alp.