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Screenshots of HikeTracker, map on the left, stats on the right

I’ve been looking for a replacement for Trails .

There are quite a lot of GPX apps out there so it has been interesting looking at them.
Many ‘hiking’ apps are concerned with giving you routes or posting routes you take their own or other services. These apps tend to be quite fully featured and often need an account on an online service. Trying a few out gave me a chance to think of what I wanted.

  1. Easy recording of a trail
  2. Trail shown live on a map, preferably OpenStreeMap.
  3. Quick and simple transfer of gpx track to my mac so that I can use it to tag photos, etc.
  4. Not completely killing the battery of my aging iPhone over a day.

Other features are either a bonus (some stats) or a complication (online services).

I’ve settled, for now at least, on HikeTracker . The app has been designed by a hiker, with the main aim of accuracy & simplicity. It fulfils all of my requirements.

The app is set up to work well “out of the box” for a hiker or walker – just tap “Start” and go!

It has worked well for me in a couple of tests, geotagging some rather blurry photos and giving me a track to add to the map.

I was happy to pay for trails and would be happy to pay for this free app too.

Featured image: Screenshots of HikeTracker, map on the left, stats on the right.

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Ardinning loch winter afternoon. Dark clouds, light silhouettes trees and reflects on the loch.

Today’s #DS106 challange is worth more than a tweet. #tdc4124 #ds106 Is today the day it all breaks? | The DS106 Daily Create

If Twitter switch off the old version of its API, then some of the functionality of the Daily Create will break today. See Cogdog’s blog for an explanation.

This sucks. It really sucks. As Alan says, life will go on. But just in case it doesn’t, make something, DS106 style, that expresses how sucky this really is.

The twitter API has, over the years, enabled a lot of wonderful things. In my opinion none more so that the #DS106 #DailyCreate. This provides simple daily creative prompts, but more importantly it pulls responses together onto its WordPress Home. I imagine Alan especially feels this pain. He has tirelessly kept this up and running and helped other use the technology elsewhere (the Daily Stillness is one I love).

There may be a silver lining, the slim chance that there is an increase in open, shares and self owned streams, open protocols and interop may increase, or even flourish. Mastodon is growing, I hope RSS does too.

Featured image, my own.