The build story
The line home.
The idea arrived on long trail days: when you disappear into the hills for eight or twelve hours, 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. Your watch quietly knows where you are. Photos you take upload themselves to the right place on the map. The people following along can comment on your adventure while it’s still happening. You just keep moving.
(The name is a hand-me-down: my very first Garmin experiment was a watch face called Skyline. This product started life as “SkyTracker” and inherited the better name — completely different codebase, 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 — private, followers-only, public, or PIN-protected for the one race where you want family in and strangers out. Groups moving together get “line parties”: everyone on one multi-colour map, with proximity alerts 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 app records in the background — a position fix every five minutes for multi-day efforts, every minute when running in the foreground — and stores points in rotating chunks sized to Connect IQ’s storage limits: three thousand points, roughly ten days of adventure, on the wrist alone. Points hop to the phone over Bluetooth in batches of twenty (the payload ceiling), and the iPhone app relays them to the web with an offline queue and exponential backoff, because the places worth tracking are exactly the places without reception. Meanwhile the phone watches the camera roll: take a photo and within seconds it’s geotagged onto your live line, no taps involved. Fifty-four watch models supported, from Fenix to Forerunner to Descent.
Parked, honestly
SkyLine is the one project in the workshop that’s 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 can’t 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 — and it’s waiting, patiently, for its builder to be its user again. It’ll be the best comeback companion imaginable.
Building something that has to span a watch, a phone, and the web? Here’s how we could work together.