Launched Wanderin.gs!

My friend Brad and I launched Wanderings, a simple location tracker app for iPhone and Web. Put it on your phone and forget about it, come back a few weeks later to have a nice heatmap of where you’ve been. It was inspired by the late lamented OpenPaths. See also Google Timeline, which is much fancier but doesn’t have a heatmap.

I was inspired to start working on this while traveling in Berlin. I just want to know where I’ve been, you know? I don’t know anything about building iPhone apps but fortunately Brad does.

The best part of the app is that we went serverless; we don’t have our own database or server processing location points anywhere. The iPhone app uploads directly to iCloud. Javascript in the web page downloads it directly and renders it. That’s good for privacy and also simplicity. I seem to be building all my web apps this way these days; Logs of Lag, Wind History, etc all work without significant server components. Sure is easy to scale and maintain.

Some of the interesting stuff we use:

• iOS significant location change service
• CloudKit database for storage
• IndexedDB and Dexie for browser cache
• Mapbox GL JS heatmaps to visualize the data

We have lots of ideas for future features. Some particular ideas I’m excited to do:

• Import of data from other sources
• Some sort of time-based visualization
• Android app (not me!)

It’s a modest project but I’m proud of it.