Code for My Tracks is now yours
May 28th, 2010 | Published in Google Earth
A year ago, we released My Tracks, an Android app that lets you track activities like hikes, bike rides and trail runs using your mobile device. Now we’re announcing the release of the My Tracks source code into the wild.
What this means to users: My Tracks will become even better. The collective intelligence of the development community will create a more powerful, more intuitive, more useful, and more robust My Tracks. In addition, complementary apps will be written (For details on third party app development, see the wiki documentation). Applications for fitness activities, geocaching—heck, even dog tracking—are not hard to imagine.
Open-sourcing My Tracks also means that bug tracking is now public. Go to the "Issues" section of the My Tracks Code site to see what is being actively developed and to file your own feature requests/bugs.
What this means to developers: You can now contribute code directly to My Tracks to improve it, fix a bug, or add a feature. We don't promise that all changes will become part of the My Tracks codebase, but cleanly coded, useful contributions have a darn good chance. If you’re feeling adventurous (and slightly masochistic), file and fix bugs for unreleased--and probably buggy--versions of My Tracks, to improve overall quality and stability. Note that for all contributions, we have a code review process—see the wiki for more information.
How non-coders can contribute: Translate My Tracks! If you'd like to translate My Tracks to your language, or fix a translation that is incorrect, please let us know at [email protected] and we'll explain how to do it. We'll soon post documents explaining the process, on the My Tracks wiki.
All development-related discussions will occur on the [email protected] list (but please don't post coding-related questions there).
This is an exciting new track for My Tracks. Jump in!