About This App
A Passion Project for a New Dad / Programmer / Fitness Freak
My Initial Draw
I am a life long fitness guy. As a kid I did club swimming, in my youth I raced Windsurfers to Olympic level, competing all over the world. After university, where I did a 4 year Computing degree I got into ever bigger endurance challenges: Marathons, Ironman traithlon then long distance cycling sportives.
When my first child was born I gave up Road Cycling for a while and Ran more, but I couldnt stay off the bike long term. Road cycling is so fulfilling but we all know the risks. I know several road cycling friends that have lost their lives and even more that have been injured from cars hitting them.
Becoming a dad gave me a motive to build an App that could help me and my family feel safer and help us keep in touch as I went off on my solo rides and runs. Plus I began to realize there was lots of other features I wanted in a fitness App that wasnt available in the market, and I might aswell just build my own. After all I had 20 years full time programming experience, how hard could it be.
Further Inspiration
I remember back in 2016 seeing the TV ads for the first waterproof cell phones and decided this seemed like the future for bike computers (We just needed battery life to improve which surely would happen in the years ahead). Why would the average cyclist down the line, buy or upgrade a seperate and expensive bike computer, if they have a new state of the art iPhone every 2 years. I had a Garmin Edge 800 at the time and found the map almost unusable while out on my bike. iPhones have amazingly clear super high resolution screens, and are so much easier to navigate using, especially when on the move.
So I Worked With Focus Over Several Years and Built This
Applying all that I have learned from a life in technology and sport I built my own professional standard Fitness App.
It's been a fun passion project (and portfolio piece as I am a freelance programmer), but also for my own personal use, so my wife can see exactly where I am when I'm out running and cycling and can be notified if I get in an accident or need help.
A lot of the principles and discipline we apply to long term enduracne training, helped me make slow but steady progress in a constant direction and every month and year see the product get better and better. Just like we see when we train over a longer term. We dont need to kill ourselves and try and do it all right away. Keep going. Slowly but surely it will come together in time.
Enjoy My Interpretation of a Fitness App - Please Contribute With Your Own Ideas and Requirements
This is based on my own ideas of what is useful, but I welcome anyone, especially regular users, to send me their suggestions for new features and I will try and include them in a future release.
This is currently iPhone only, and I plan to do an iWatch extension next. Depending on the level of positive interest I would look to do an Android Version too.
