My Second App, and the Simple Thing I Kept Wanting

Building DashLog, a small private route journal for drives, trips, and everywhere in between.

I started noticing something while running a while back.

Nothing serious. Just a couple times a week, pretty slow, mostly to get myself out of the house. But the part I enjoyed most wasn’t always the run itself. It was looking at the route afterward.

How far I’d gone. Where I’d turned. The little shape of the trip laid out on a map.

Then I realized I wanted the same thing for other kinds of movement too.

A drive to see my family. A weekend trip. A bike ride along the river.

Basically, any time I went somewhere, I wanted a simple way to look back at where I’d been and how far I’d gone.

The Idea Was Broader Than I Expected

I’ll admit that sounds a little broad.

Cars, running, and cycling all at once can be a sign you haven’t thought it through. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea either.

But what I actually wanted was much simpler than that:

“When I go somewhere, I’d like to be able to look back at it later.”

That was it.

So I went looking for an app that did that, and a lot of them felt like they were solving a different problem.

Some were packed with things I didn’t need, like fuel logs and service reminders. Others were simpler, but still asked me to create an account and sync everything to the cloud before I could record a single trip.

Just to keep track of where I’d gone, on roads near my own house.

My Phone Already Knows Where It Is

The thing is, my phone already knows where it is.

Recording a route doesn’t need a server. It doesn’t need an account. And there’s no reason my trips should automatically sit on someone else’s machine.

The GPS is already in my pocket.

After a while, the “sign in and sync to the cloud” part felt less like something the app needed and more like something the company wanted.

So I built one myself.

Building It Was Simpler, Until It Wasn’t

DashLog is my second app, so I figured it would be easier than the first.

Some of it was. I’d already been through the store accounts and the review process once.

But the location stuff turned out to be tricky.

Keeping route recording alive in the background without killing the battery. Handling GPS gaps. Getting the map to feel right. Making sure the app kept recording even when the screen was off.

I spent way more time than I expected on things most people will probably never notice.

And again, the hardest part was deciding what to leave out.

Keeping It Small on Purpose

From the beginning, I had the same worry:

Was I trying to do too much?

So I cut it way down.

You tap once when you start moving. You tap once when you stop.

That’s it.

DashLog saves your route, distance, time, and speed, and lets you go back and look at it later. You can also replay a trip and watch the route draw itself out on the map.

That replay feature was honestly the one I wanted most.

A Private Trip Journal

I imagine DashLog mostly for ordinary trips.

A drive to somewhere you care about. A weekend route. A simple record of where you went.

It can work for runs or bike rides too, but I don’t really think of it as a fitness app. I think of it more as a private trip journal.

It’s not a do-everything app, and I’m not going to pretend it is.

I kept it simple on purpose.

Tap to start. Tap to stop. Your records stay on your phone.

No account. No upload. No server keeping tabs on where you go.

I use it mostly for drives and small trips, and sometimes for runs too. Turns out “record where I went” is the same quiet little job whether you’re moving fast or slow.

I called it DashLog.

It’s available on iOS and Android.

This is the second app I’ve made.

The first one, NoisyNo, is a totally different thing. It cleans up background noise in recordings, right on your phone. If you’re curious, you can check it out here:

I keep everything I’ve made in one place at:

https://grayforge.app