Introduction of the Journeys app

Some of you may already have noticed. I am working on a small app of my own. The Journeys app is a small utility to keep track of my hiking habits. You can see how long you’ve been walking and where you’ve been. There’s even a chart showing the distance you’ve traveled.

For health reasons I have to walk at least an hour every day. It can get quite boring so I had to find something to get more out of it. Having to walk was the best excuse I had to build an app and at the same time, the app will provide me with some interesting data about each of the routes I walk every day. It basically shows me progress towards the goal of walking 5KM a day.

In this post you will find an overview of the features in the app and some of the neat little tricks in the user interface.

App features

The Journeys app is a small app. It does one thing, keep track of where you’re going. Of course it doesn’t do that every moment of the day. You have to explicitly tell it to follow you. Every trip gets saved by the app and statistics are collected about the distance and time you needed to travel that distance.

As with every WP7 app, this app is designed following the Metro design language. The first screen that you enter is the journeys panorama. Here you find a chart with the distances you already walked and a list of recent trips. You can also find the statistics collected about your trips on this panorama.

The option that probably is going to be used the most (At least I will be using that option the most) is the “Record a new trip” option. By clicking on this option you move over to the “Record trip” screen. On this screen you can start and stop recording a new trip.

When you have recorded a trip, you can see the details of that trip by selecting the trip in the “Recent trips” grid or by looking it up in the list of recorded trips. When you have selected a trip from the list you will be taken to the “Trip details” screen.

The trip details screen gives you the stats for that particular trip and a map displaying the route you walked.

Show me the goods, where can I download the app?

I have submitted it to the Microsoft marketplace. You can download it now from this location.