The application needs your email address to customize your experience and save your work. When you launch the applicatiopn you will need to Sign Up or Login with our third-party authentication service Auth0. This provides the option to enter an email and password, or sign in with Google. We store your email address to create your database profile and that's it.

First step is to create a trip and click Save Trip. This starts a trip in the app, which can be saved to the database as soon as you have entered at least one meal. It is recommended that you scroll to and click Save Trip Often to avoid losing work and having to re-enter things.

River-Planner has several meals loaded to choose from. These are basic templates designed to be a basis for your own customization (you can also design your own meals as you will see). To add a meal to your trip, select a river day and click the "+" button to add it to your trip menu. Meals added will appear under "Customize Trip Menu...", grouped by river day.

Any meals added to your trip are listed by River Day and are fully customizable. Click the Pencil to open the Edit Meal Interface, Or click Trash to remove a meal from that day.

The number of adults and kids can be modified for a given meal. This is to accomodate times where people may join or exit a river trip at an intermediate point. This happens from time to time, so the River-Planner app can account for this. Changing the number of people in the Edit Meal Interface will re-calculate the ingredient quantities for the meal being edited.

Ingredients are listed with the ingredient name, description, units of calculation, multiplier, and the current calculated quantity to have for the meal. Quantity is calculated based on the number of adults and kids entered when setting up the trip, or the adjusted number of people, if modified.

If the quantity of an ingredient does not look right for what you have in mind, simply change the quantity value and the multiplier will adjust to accomodate future changes to the number of people. Changes to quantity apply only to the meal being edited, and would need to be repeated for other instances of the ingredient throughout the trip menu, if those changes are desired elsewhere as well. Click the Trash icon to remove an ingredient from that meal.

The drop-down selector lists available ingredients. Select an ingredient from the drop-down picker, then Click the '+' icon to add that ingredient to the meal. If using a keyboard, typing zooms alphabetically to ingredients as you type, on mobile this is usually not the case and only the scrolling picker is available.

Enter information for your new ingredient in the Orange Form Fields. Use the Orange Quantity Calculator Fields (Quantity, Serves) to calculate a multiplier for your ingredient. What you choose for Units is up to you. It may make sense to have units of "ounces", or it might make sense to use units such as "12 ounce can" or "Standard box of Zattaran's rice".

Enter values for "Quantity" and "Serves" to calculate a multiplier for the ingredient. In this example, the user searched online for packaged dried dates and inspected the package weight and Serving Size information to ascertain that 12 ounces of dates serves 7 people, as per the package label. Click the '+' icon to save your new ingredient to the database. It will then be available in the ingredient drop-down picker and you can add it to your meal. The ingredient will be available to you any time you use the River-Planner application.

In this example, the user then selected their new ingredient (Dates) from the Add Ingredient drop-down selector and added them to the meal by clicking the '+' icon. The quantity is calculated based on the number of people entered. Click Save at the bottom of the interface to save your meal edits. Click Cancel to close the inerface without saving.

The Create New Meal Interface is accessed from the "Select Meals..." section by clicking "Create a New Meal".

Add ingredients to your new meal: Adding and Creating Ingredients works the same in this interface as in the Edit Meal Interface, described above. Note that quantities are not part of the Create New Meal process, and are not displayed since this meal will apply to any number of people when using it later. If added to your current trip, the quantities will be calculated for your entered number of people, for example.

Enter the basic tools needed and instructions to prepare the meal. Each tool or preparation step should be separated by semi-colons.

Click Save at the bottom of the interface to save your new meal. The meal will now be available to you whenever you use the River-Planner application in the "Select Meals..." section under its Meal Type. Click Cancel to close the inerface without saving.

The View and Download Interface is accessed from the "Customize Trip Menu..." section by clicking "View and Download".

View the shopping list. Items are grouped by ingrdedient and quantities are summed up. "Meal Count" indicates how many meals the ingredient is used in.

Click 'Export Shopping List' to download an HTML file of the shopping list. View this list with a browser on your mobile device while shopping for food.

When viewing the downloaded HTML file of the shopping list in a browser (Microsoft Edge seems to work best), tap items to cross them out on the list. If viewing the list in anything other than a browser, crossout is not supported.

iPhone and Android phones differ in how to view an HTML file. The browser option is usually available right after downloading the file. You can always download the shopping list again from the application if needed, your crossouts will be remembered by the browser.

Enter the basic tools needed and instructions to prepare the meal. Each tool or preparation step should be separated by semi-colons.

On-river Daily Menu does not have crossout functionality at this time.