A phone loses the hotspot
It picks the thread back up the moment it returns. The laptop holds the truth; the phones are only input devices. Whatever happened on the other boards during the gap is right there again.
Without internet
A darts tournament in a room with no wifi, with phones at the boards.
The rooms people throw darts in are rarely the rooms with good coverage. A barn, a cellar under the pub, a marquee in the yard. So the offline edition of darttournament.app runs entirely on the laptop that is there anyway — the phones come in through that laptop, not through the internet.
How it works with no connection
01
The laptop is the server
You start the program and it listens on your own machine. There is no account, no login and no server anywhere else — everything lives in one file on your own disk. Nothing that happens that evening leaves the room.
02
The phones join over a hotspot
Turn on the personal hotspot from the laptop or from a phone, have the others join it, and they are connected to each other without any internet involved. On startup the program shows the address you type in at the boards.
A hotspot with no internet behind it is fine. Some phones complain that there is "no internet" and want to fall back to mobile data — dismiss that warning once and it stays put afterwards.
03
The big screen hangs off the same laptop
The room display is a second window on the second screen. Cable in, window across, done. That does not go over the network either, so a flaky connection cannot take the display down.
What happens when something does drop out
Two people enter at the same time
Every entry carries the version number of what that phone last saw. If it is behind, the entry is refused and the screen fetches the current state first. That way an old screen never overwrites somebody else's result.
The laptop dies
Every change is written out immediately and backups are kept. Start it again and the evening is back exactly as it was. At Open Darts that happened sixty-eight times in one night, without anybody thinking about it.
Offline or in the cloud?
Take offline if…
- the room has no usable wifi, or you are not sure that it has
- you run the same night more than once and would rather not pay each time
- you prefer your entrants' names not to end up anywhere else
- you do not mind starting a program on your own laptop
Take the cloud if…
- there is wifi and you would rather install nothing
- you want to share the results with the players afterwards
- you want to follow along on your own phone while you are throwing
- you are running one night and would rather not think about it
The Club plan includes the offline edition, so then you do not have to choose. What is in which plan is on the pricing page.
What to sort out beforehand
- A laptop with power. It will last an evening on battery, but you sleep better with a plug.
- A hotspot with a password you put on a card at every board.
- The cable to the room screen, and an adapter if it is an older projector.
- One dry run with two phones, at home. Ten minutes, and it saves the queue at the laptop.
The full running order for the evening is on how to organise a darts tournament.
The offline edition
Pay once, runs on your own laptop, no account and no internet. It is not on sale yet — leave your address and you will hear when it is.