The build story
The line home.
The idea came from long trail days. Disappear into the hills for eight or twelve hours and the people at home want to see the dot moving, and the last thing you want mid-race is to stop, dig out a phone and type a status update. SkyLine is that idea built properly. The watch knows where you are. Photos upload themselves to the right place on the map. The people following can comment while it is still happening. You keep moving.
(The name is a hand-me-down. My first Garmin experiment was a watch face called Skyline. This product started life as SkyTracker and inherited the better name: a different codebase, the same hills.)
A line is a living thing
On the server a “line” is an active tracking session: a stream of GPS points with photos and messages attached as it grows. Sharing is tiered the way real life needs it: private, followers only, public, or PIN-protected for the one race where family is in and strangers are out. Groups moving together get line parties, everyone on one map in their own colour, with an alert when a crew member comes within a kilometre. The whole system exists for one moment: somebody at a kitchen table, watching your dot crest the last climb.
Three devices, one relay
The watch records in the background: a fix every five minutes on multi-day efforts, every minute when the app is in the foreground. Points sit in rotating chunks sized to Connect IQ’s storage limits, three thousand of them, roughly ten days of adventure on the wrist alone. They hop to the phone over Bluetooth twenty at a time, which is the payload ceiling, and the iPhone app relays them to the web through an offline queue with exponential backoff. The phone also watches the camera roll: take a photo and within seconds it is geotagged onto the live line, no taps involved.
Parked, honestly
SkyLine is the one project in the workshop that is deliberately paused, and it deserves a straight answer as to why. A virus took the long days in the hills off the table for a while, and an adventure tracker built by someone who cannot currently adventure would be development by guesswork. The platform works end to end, watch to phone to a live map someone’s mum can follow. It is waiting for its builder to be its user again.
Building something that has to span a watch, a phone, and the web? Here’s how we could work together.