Driveline – new open source iOS app I wrote to help with my road trips

Just thought I'd post here in case someone had a similar use case to me – which admittedly might be unlikely! I wrote and open sourced an iOS app that I called Driveline.

The primary purpose of the app is to record my road trips so that I can publish maps on my travel blog – Targa Trips. Previously, what I mostly did was take a screenshot of Apple or Google Maps showing a route. But that suffered from two problems: (a) it would show suggested routes, not necessarily the one I drove and (b) it would often show alternative routes too.

You can see an example of this at: https://www.targatrips.com/trips-ar...-15-kiel-germany-hook-of-holland-netherlands/

This app solves that by: (a) recording the actual route driven and (b) doing so without me having to remember to start/stop it.

It also saves off all the exact position data into a GPX file format (originally invented by Garmin). I plan to – eventually use this – to create a moving map kind of blog post. That as the viewer scrolls through the blog, the dot moves along the route to reflect what part of the map the blog paragraph they are reading relates to.

I’ve never seen a travel blog quite pull that off. And it does it all in a highly privacy preserving way – with no third parties, and no commercial angle. And its open sourced:

https://github.com/dglancy/Driveline

Lovely! I’m gonna use that for the upcoming vacation..
Must say it’s a very smart idea, I always loved this feature on the motorcycle Garmin, but it only records for a few hours and then overwrites itself….

Looks great! I will certainly try this out for our summer trips around Norway

targa666 said:

Lovely! I’m gonna use that for the upcoming vacation..
Must say it’s a very smart idea, I always loved this feature on the motorcycle Garmin, but it only records for a few hours and then overwrites itself….

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Hope it goes well. Great username!

tigerbalm said:

Hope it goes well. Great username!

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Thanks. My Porsche-heritage started with 2 targas (1980 SC and 1984 3.2). Used this name eversince!

Looks good. I used to map our Tesla trips with a service which polled the car every few seconds and constructed maps (and collated other data which could be useful later eg to challenge an incorrect parking fine). But I think the Taycan’s connectivity and server reliability is so poor that your app-based approach may be better.

Vibe coded?

whitex said:

Vibe coded?

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Boo hiss

Google Maps/ Timeline has been doing that for avoir 10 years

Sly_North said:

Google Maps/ Timeline has been doing that for avoir 10 years

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True but as Tigerbalm noted, without privacy protection. I turned off Google location tracking they already know too much (and probably ate recording it anyway.)

Great idea, I've downloaded it. Thanks!

MoniqueDenver said:

True but as Tigerbalm noted, without privacy protection.

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It's fully on our device and never leaves it.

It’s probably too much to ask for, especially with a free app, but is there a way to make it automatic, similar to MileIQ?

questionmillennium said:

It’s probably too much to ask for, especially with a free app, but is there a way to make it automatic, similar to MileIQ?

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A key feature of the app is that it starts and stops automatically based on either connecting to your car bluetooth or carplay.

Unfortunately, due to privacy limitations by Apple, you do have to set that up manually in the "Shortcuts" app. The app does describe how to do that once you download it and grant it location permissions. But if you tell me you are Bluetooth or CarPlay (or both) user, I can also try and help you set it up based on my own setup.

whitex said:

Vibe coded?

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I'm not sure, depends on what is meant by vibe coded. If it means using AI to create something at a high level ("make me a drive tracking app") that I would not have been able to make otherwise – then no, its not vibe coded.

If it means, did I use any AI to help or accelerate specific elements of development while standing over the codebase – then yep, it is vibe coded.

Software engineers have been using compilers to generate code since the early 50s. I appreciate that AI is a higher level of abstraction again – but it remains to me – the same principle.

I find if you build software in the same way as always: data model up through services layers and into the UI – it works very well.