emich labs

I spent last week in Beijing, China, giving a training to software engineers that were going to use Android for developping. For me this was the first time I ever went to China and it was a real fun experience that I’m willing to repeat. My Chinese students were really a nice crowd to teach.

Apart from giving that training, I did some tourism in and outside Beijing for some days. The highlights were the Forbidden City, the Hutongs but also the unmissable Great Wall of China. I did a hike between the less touristic and more authentic sections of Jinshanling and Simatai, which represents around 8 km of wall. But those 8 kilometers weren’t flat, some parts were quite steep with steps on the stairs of different heights.

This hike was my first real occasion to do GPS logging with MyTracks. I tested it before, but usually for 500 meters in my flat part of the world.

MyTracks is awesome. It records your latitude, longitude, altitude, bearing, speed and time. It puts it all in statistics and graphs and having a look at it afterwards is a really great thing to analyze your elevation and speed, how steep the hike wa, etc. but it’s also fun to show to your friends and family. Let’s have a look at some screenshots:

MyTracks allows you to export your files to GPX, KML (download it here) and even publish it straight to Google Maps and Google Docs. Here is a screenshot, using the KML in Google Earth:

I really love this type of software as location is one of my favorite things to do with mobile. MyTracks is available on the Android Market and is published by Google. It’s not new, I know, but I love it and wanted to share that with you.

Ow, let’s just end with one picture of the wall.