Axel Ancona Esselmann
San Francisco, CA • Axel@AnconaEsselmann.com • LinkedIn • www.anconaesselmann.com
Traces
An application for visualizing GPS tracks and generating beautiful trace-artwork.
Your runkeeper.com activities with GPS tracks get automatically downloaded and imported.
Explore your activities with an interactive map.
Combine your activities with those of your friends to create beautiful multi-colored masterpieces.
Export your artwork as images for printing or sharing on social media.
Export GPS tracks as KML files for viewing in Google Earth. GPS tracks get converted to "tracks" as well as "tours".
Traces is in private alpha testing. Contact me to be added as a test user.
Overview
If you are not an alpha tester, you can view my runs within San Francisco, my wife's runs, or you can view both of our runs combined.
Navigation:
You can zoom with you mouse or with the "+" and "-" keys.
Drag with you mouse or use the arrow keys to move within the map.
The geo-coordinates of your cursor's location are displayed in the lower left corner.
Editing:
The menu for editing can be accessed by clicking on the "plus" sing in the upper right corner.
Clicking anywhere on the map will hide the menu.
Several sliders let you edit the appearance of your traces.
The stroke-width stays constant when zooming. You might want to adjust the stroke-width after zooming in or out.
You can edit the opacity of your traces. At a high opacity, all traces will look similar. At lower opacity settings, paths most frequently traveled will show up more vividly, whereas seldomly traveled ones will appear faint.
Four sliders are for adjusting the color. You can change the background color, or the track color for each user. The element that is currently being altered is highlighted below the color sliders.
The first three color sliders are for mixing your desired color with the colors red, green and blue. Slide a color-slider to the left to lower it's intensity, slide it to the right to increase it. The fourth slider adjusts the hue of your color by keeping all color sliders static with respect to each other.
Use presets to get an idea of what is possible.
You can view maps from other users if they made their activities public. Add additional users by appending the view-url with user-ids.
If you are part of the private alpha testing, you can manually update your activities by logging in and utilizing the update-service at anconaesselmann.com/runs/update, which downloads and imports new activities from runkeeper.com.