Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

I wrote a simple app last year that put all my Apple Watch workout routes on a simple map, so I can see how much of the city I’ve covered (all existing options were paid, and I was too cheap for it). Now I have some time, so rewriting it properly that’s based on neighbourhood, completion %s, achievements and etc. It’s weirdly fun, because I’m not a mobile engineer, but satisfying to see hundreds of users per month using my app.

Also, every region has different ways of representing a “neighbourhood”, so I get to learn how to extract viable data from each city. Lots of map stuff, I’m genuinely enjoying it!

This sounds wonderful. Do you have some writeup about it or screenshots?

Did you look at the squadrats app? It’s compatible with strava also. It sounds quite similar to what you describe.

There's wandrer.earth as well, though it's based on roads, not neighborhoods or squares

Not Squadrats, but I've checked out some others, like CityStrides. There were a few problems though:

- It felt like what I wanted to achieve is pretty simple (GPS coordinates -> display all on the same map), so didn't want to subscribe for a monthly fee. I couldn't actually find an app that would dump all my HealthKit data directly onto the map, which was surprising.

- Last year when I wrote my app, I wanted to see how fast I can learn simple mobile development loop

- Now, I couldn't really find anything that divides the coverage areas into real-world neighbourhoods. So, think of West Village of NYC, or Yorkville in Toronto, or Yoyogi in Shibuya and etc. Back when I used to live in Vancouver, I would look at my own app, and kinda say in my head "aight, I've walked through every street in West End, Vancouver". Figured it would be cool to have a proper way of tracking it. So working on it currently.

- It's kinda fun to work on an app for my own needs

I'll take a look at the squadrats though! Looks pretty cool.

Hm, the new version is very rough right now, as I've been focusing on API/Data side of things. But generally the idea is something like these: - https://uc792df8aab8345f71952cc54569.previews.dropboxusercon...

- https://uceed957a657be57d7d53af97504.previews.dropboxusercon...

It felt good when I was able to figure out how to generate all the neighbourhood data for any given city. A bunch of fun OSM data manipulation though.

If you meant the app that I wrote last year, it's here - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mapcut/id6478268682. The idea is much simpler though, as I mentioned.

Is your app on TestFlight?

HealthFit is pretty good, one-time fee, shows interesting heatmaps on all of your Apple Health workouts: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/healthfit/id1202650514