Feature Friday #6: drill importer, no-card trial, 44 fixes

This week (August 28-September 3) we shipped: a drill importer in beta, a free trial that starts without a card, member IDs from any governing body, a redesigned sign-in and onboarding, a new film control bar, heat levels on the field forecast, and 44 smaller fixes.

Drill importer

Your drills probably live in a Google Doc, or in a PDF a previous coach handed down. Getting them into the Library meant retyping them one at a time, which is why most teams never did. Now you paste the text or drop the PDF - typed or scanned, up to 10 MB - and Ulti-Mate reads it and drafts one drill per entry it finds.

After reading your text or PDF, a review shows each draft drill beside the passage it was extracted from, highlights any field it guessed rather than read directly so you can confirm or fix it, and flags a draft that looks like a drill that already exists in your team library. Keep what you want, fix what was imported incorrectly, then add them with one click. You can save your progress and return to an import later, each past run has its own page, and you can stop a run partway if you pasted the wrong document.

The importer is in beta, and while it is, each team gets five runs - a run takes a whole document, so that covers a lot of drills, and if you need more, just email us at help@ulti-mate.app. The document is read by Google's Gemini, which is noted in the privacy policy.

Free trial, no card

Starting a team's free trial used to mean a trip to a Stripe checkout page that asked for nothing and sent you back. It starts in place now, on the last step of setting up a team, and no card is involved.

Also, every new team now gets a free trial, not just your first team.

While the free trial runs, everyone on the team can see how long is left - a pill in the topbar, and a strip above the page in the last week - not just the admin. We also now send out reminder emails to team admins, summarizing features that you have taken advantage of and nudging you to try other features.

When the free trial ends, the team goes read-only: no data is deleted and stays readable, and any pending invites are paused. The terms are on the pricing page.

Member IDs

Rostering for a sanctioned event means collecting every player's membership number, and the usual way is individually messaging teammates. Players can now keep their member IDs on their profile: pick the governing body, type the number, add another if you hold two. WFDF and fifteen national bodies are listed, with an "other" row for anything else.

Your team names the organization it registers with under Settings, and the roster gets a Member ID column showing that body's number for every player - so when a roster is due, the numbers are one column to read down instead of a thread to scroll back through. Leadership and the player themselves can see it; nobody else.

Sign-in and onboarding

The sign-in, onboarding, and create-a-team flows are all redesigned with a cleaner, more minimal, common look. This matches industry standards and makes your progress and next steps clearer.

Also, after onboarding you'll get a short tour of the application layout. After that, each page offers its own tour once, under its heading; decline and it stops asking, and a switch in Preferences turns them all off.

Film control bar

Previously, the film page showed the YouTube timeline and a custom Ulti-Mate timeline. We've removed the YouTube bar, and improved the Ulti-Mate timeline to have a track with the notes marked on it, previous and next note, a "Note at 0:52" button that opens the composer on that frame, half speed for the foul argument, volume, captions when the film has them, and a full screen that keeps the notes under the video. Also, adding a film fills in the title from the link now.

One trade-off: you can't pick the video quality anymore - YouTube sets that from your connection.

Heat level on the forecast

An event's forecast now scores the event's hours against USA Ultimate's heat guidelines and states the precaution level, across the whole event window. We reference the wet bulb globe temperature and heat index from the National Weather Service and check them against USA Ultimate's guidelines. Note that the forecast, and the heat level with it, is still US-only.

Smaller fixes

• Schedule opens on the month view unless you've picked the list, and the view and month are in the URL, so a link opens where you were. A new event says what it overlaps while you type the time, and a venue created mid-event is a real place - address, pin, timezone, directions.
• Editing a recurring practice moves the series in place. The plans, comments and photos on each week stay attached, where rebuilding the series used to drop them.
• Preferences has a 12-hour / 24-hour choice, and every time in the app follows it. Date and time fields are typed segment by segment, with the format in the label.
• Every field on every plan card edits in place. On a library card an edit is an override for that placement, with Reset to library or Detach from library in the menu; a section can be given a length of its own, and a column added by mistake can be removed.
• Deleting something, publishing a draft event, answering a team invite and promoting a member confirm with a toast, since the result lands where you weren't looking. Comment threads have a search box, and a nickname is quoted wherever it names a person.
• An accessibility round: select-all and the arrow keys work in the sign-in code field, the film timeline stopped announcing itself four times a second, and a marked heat hour carries its level for a screen reader.
• A backend pass: a player re-added to the roster, or who joined by invite, now sees the events created while they were away, and the ones already hidden were repaired. A promotion moves you onto captains-only events.
• A speed pass: the schedule loads without the recurrence library, and event pages read a plan's stored summary instead of recomputing it.
• Plus the rest - 44 fixes in all this week, and the running list is in #changelog in the Discord.

What we're working on next

Games and tournaments. Creating an event picks the type first, and each type gets its own defaults and fields - a game with an opponent, home or away, a time to arrive before; a tournament that holds its games, so the weekend reads as one thing on the schedule. The first pieces are built and being tested.

Tell us what your team needs - the Discord or feedback@ulti-mate.app.

— Victor