Parsing GPX files with Swift

I've been playing around with a really fun experiment the past few days using Swift. I don't have much experience with Mac OS development, but have been very pleasantly surprised by Swift and Swift UI! There's so much that can be accomplished out of the box that I haven't even looked into third-party packages. It's also been really nice to take a step away from web development (I'm working on htmlCMS as my other project). No servers, auth, deployments, databases, CSS, etc. It's so refreshing to have one way of doing it right, not a million.

For this Swift/Mac OS experiment, I've been building a parser for GPX files. A GPX file is generated by a GPS as a log of coordinates for a path. In cycling, this corresponds to your ride. The file can also include metadata from sensors, such as speed, cadence, heart rate, elevation and air temperature. I find this data fascinating and love exploring my stats after a ride, but sadly the best way to do that on the market, Strava, is undergoing some rapid enshittification, locking stuff behind a pay, introducing A.I. and actively making the experience worse. So I decided to build something for myself!

My goal is to display your route on the map, along with "events" marked on the map. For example, instead of digging through charts you'll be able to look at the map to review your ride and see markers for things like "5% Grade Climb Start" -> "Zone 5 HR" -> "Climb Ended" -> "Max Speed" -> "Zone 4 HR". These markers let you see how quickly you achieved the climb, how much it stressed your body, and how far along the route it took to recover. I'm finding this to be a lot more effective than Strava's method of outlining information.

Here's a look at what I've accomplished in the past 2 days, more to come soon!