Camino Now Changelog

Ok, it's not a traditional reverse chronological changelog, more a narrative of the pains and pleasures that led to Camino Now.

Humble Beginnings (2022)

In the beginning, there was the Fountain Finder, an app that would simply point at the next potable water source. We manually maintained the database of fountains, until that was such a herculean task, we either had to buy way more pizza for way more volunteers or to rethink the whole thing.

Enter OpenStreetMap, the world's largest geospatial database. Pouring our 1804 fountains alongside their potability status into the database was not fun, but we got it done. Roughly 1000 fountains already existed, 800 had to be added and set as needed. Task done.openstreetmap.org

Next, find a way to sync the app and the DB: half a day. Create backend for volunteers to check submissions and add them to OSM? Nother half day.

It going so well, I thought about things. In retrospect, I should probably have gone for a beer instead, but that weekend the first iteration of Camino.Now was born, using OSM data for mapping, my own GPX tracks for routing, and missing about half of the towns on the Francés. That was fall of 2022.

1.0

1.0 was released in the spring of 2023. It crashed every five minutes, led to some fun misrouting accidents that once got me drunk at a monastery in the middle of nowhere, and drained a friends' roaming plan in less than a week. Oh, the beauty of not knowing what you're doing.

1.1

1.1 came shortly thereafter, was a bit more polished, a first stab at "offline first", and featured a new algorithm to estimate elevation changes and distances from a point {x/y/z} to the nearest trackpoint in the database. To explain this, let's assume you're standing in a town, roughly half a mile from the "Camino" as the app knows it. The app will now calculate the distance from your position to the nearest point on the track, and then estimate the elevation change based on the elevation of that point and the next one.

This was a huge improvement over the previous version, which simply used the distance between two points in a straight line, leading to some very inaccurate results. But how do you estimate elevation changes? What, if there's a 350 meter (there are none of those, but you get the drift) hill climb and descent between you and the Camino?

Enter ParseTopo, a small library to parse topographical data from GeoTIFF files. It uses the SRTM data[^1], which is available for free and provides elevation data at a resolution of 30 meters. This allows the app to calculate elevation changes more accurately, even if you're not directly on the Camino. It's still somewhat ... hacky ... but it works. To not overload the app, we downloaded a bounding box of 200 meters around the Camino trackpoints, packed all that into a very neat binary format, and used that to estimate elevation changes and distances.en.wikipedia.org

1.2

1.2 was a major overhaul and didn't happen until 2025. Yes, two years later. In the mean time I'd left my job, moved to an old house in Bavaria, Germany, contemplated getting a dog and leaving the Camino behind. It'd changed, post-COVID, become more commerical, less human, less personal. My favorite albergues had closed or were struggling, bars got bought by massive international conglomerates in the pursuit of pilgrim monies, and the competition had become more cut throat on the Ways.

I moved to Flutter as my framework of choice, and started to rewrite the app from scratch. That brought many bugs back, oh so many bugs... but at least I'd be able to publish both an Android and iOS version of the app, which was a major goal. And I could compile the whole thing on a MacBoook, so I could work from the Camino, instead of my desk at home.

It also added OSM submissions for albergues, and a new POI feature.

1.3

1.3 added bed bug reports, more albergue features, and better maps. It also brought back the SRTM data parser and improved the overall user experience. The POI database, though, sat neglected...

1.4

1.4 is the one in the making right now. Available on TestFlight for iOS. We're focusing on adding POI to the database and improve caching for offline first use.testflight.apple.com

[^1]: The SRTM data is available for free from the USGS Earth Explorer or NASA's LP DAAC. It's not available for commerical work, so there's another reason it's a good idea to have a 100% free app :). See https://bwinkel.github.io/pycraf/pathprof/working_with_srtm.html for Python.earthexplorer.usgs.govlpdaac.usgs.gov