Tiny Travel Tracker keeps track of your GPS location in a private, encrypted database able to store and effectively view hundreds of thousands of GPS points, which are all stored directly on your phone. It has an advanced user interface to see exactly when and where you have gone. The data is owned and viewable only by you, and can be exported to a standard GPX format to use as you wish.
The GPS tracking can be throttled in order to conserve battery
life, making it entirely feasible to leave on continually and have
an automatic electronic journal of everywhere you have gone.
This screen shows a map of the world along with GPS points
recorded, as shown in Figure 1.1, below. Any pictures and video
that were taken will also automatically be shown where they were
taken along the GPS trail.
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Figure 1.1 The main map screen |
The map can be panned by sliding your finger across it, and
zoomed in and out by pressing the zoom buttons, , or pinching your fingers
in and out.
After collecting a large number of points, you often will want to
view a small time range, such as a single day, week, or month. The
Time Range, shown below in Figure 1.2, is used to do this.
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Figure 1.2 The gray area at the bottom selects the time being viewed and can be adjusted by sliding your finger across it |
The time range can be moved by sliding your finger across the
panel side to side, or up and down. Sliding side to side will move
backwards and forwards in time. Dragging up and down will increase
and decrease the time scale, from months all the way down to
minutes. If the trail goes off the map, you may have to zoom out
or adjust the map view. You can also use the Auto Zoom button, , as described here
The current time range will be shown in the white text at the
top of gray panel. This corresponds to the time that falls within
the H shaped marker in the center. For example in Figure 1.3,
below, the time range is April through August.
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Figure 1.3 Time View with time range from April to August, 2012 |
The color of the trail corresponds to the colored area in the
bottom panel. In Figure 1.4, below, the orange color is around May
29th, and the GPS Trail indicates the user was in Istanbul. The
green color is June 1st, and the user was near the center of
Turkey, and the blue color was around June 4th, and the user was
on the southern shore.
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Figure 1.4 The colors of GPS Trail correspond to the times in the bottom panel |
You can also use the Auto Zoom button which will fit the map to
the current time range displayed. For instance, in Figure 1.5,
below, only part of the points within the time range are visible.
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Figure 1.5 The Auto Zoom button will recenter the map to show the current GPS trail |
By tapping the Auto Zoom button, , the map view will automatically shift so the
entire visible GPS trail for the selected range will be shown as
in Figure 1.6, below.
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Figure 1.6 After tapping Auto Zoom button
the map view shifts to show all GPS points within the
selected time range |
The Distance Traveled field shows the approximate distance
traveled during the time range selected.
The accuracy of the value displayed will depend on the number of
GPS points taken and the accuracy of your GPS hardware.
The Date Chooser Button, shown below in Figure 1.7 is used to
choose specific start and end times
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Figure 1.7 The Date Chooser Button |
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Figure 1.8 The Date Chooser screen. This can be used to select a specific time range to show on the main screen |
After selecting a specific time range and hitting OK, the main
screen will appear showing the GPS trail for the specific time
range.
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Pictures and videos taken by your phone will automatically show
up on your GPS trail, as shown below in Figure 1.9
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Figure 1.9 Map view with pictures and videos displayed |
You can turn pictures on and off using the settings button, on later phones
and
, in
the bottom right corner of the screen and selecting "Turn off
photos" or "Show Photos"
If you tap on a picture, , the picture will appear in a full screen.
Pictures that were taken near the same place are shown together
with a stack of photos icon,
. Tapping on a stack of photos will cause a bar of
photos will appear that you can scroll through by sliding your
finger across them, as shown below:
By tapping on one of the pictures in the bar it will be shown in a
full screen view as in Figure 1.10, below.
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Figure 1.10 |
Using or
on older
phones, you can bring up a menu to share the image through email,
SMS, etc. or to delete the image:
The Find my Location button, will center the map on your current
location, as shown in Figure 1.11, below. Note that if the Find my
Location button is grayed out,
, then
your GPS location is currently not known.
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Figure 1.11 The screen is centered on the
current location after the Find my Location button, ![]() |
The blue arrow, , shows your current position and the heading
based on the direction the phone is pointing.
Sometimes you want to know the times and dates you visited a
particular area. You can do this by tapping directly on the GPS
trail or creating a rectangle around the place of interest.
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Figure 1.12 By tapping on the points in
Singapore, the window in Figure 1.13 (below) will appear |
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Figure 1.13 Selecting the center row will
adjust the selected time range to only the period within
that row |
As above, I was in Singapore 3 times, and traveled a total
distance of 251.4 miles while there. If I tap on one of the rows
in the window, the Time Range will narrow to show only the times
in the row. For instance, if I tap on the middle row, the Time
Range narrows from Jan 4th, 2011 to Jan 16th, 2011, as shown below
in Figure 1.14.
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Figure 1.14 Tapping the minimize button and
Auto Zoom button will show the GPS Trail during that time
period |
Then if I close the window using the button, and tap
the Auto Zoom button,
, the screen will zoom in to viewable GPS
trail, as shown in Figure 1.15
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Figure 1.15 The GPS trail during the
selected time period |
You can also select a larger area by pressing your finger and
holding it down over one corner of the area, and then sliding it
to encompass the area you are interested in. For instance, in
Figure 1.16, suppose I wanted to find the time and distance
traveled when I was walking through Petra.
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Figure 1.16 Select a rectangular area by
pressing and holding in one corner, then dragging to the
other corner |
By pressing and holding my finger in the upper left corner and
sliding it to the bottom right corner, I can select a bigger area,
as shown below in Figure 1.16
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Figure 1.17 Selecting a specific area to view time and distance information |
This shows that I arrived at 6:40 AM and left and 6:35 PM and
spent 11 hours and 54 minutes, and traveled 11.7 miles.
The map tiles are downloaded automatically when connected to the
internet, and then saved in a cache for when the phone is offline.
The settings screen can be opened by tapping the or
button on
older phones, and then tapping "Settings" from the menu as shown
below
This option will turn GPS point collection on and off. GPS point
collection will remain on regardless if the Tiny Travel Tracker
app is running or not.
To verify that readings are being taken, look for an icon of a
frog, in the upper left
corner of the screen, as shown below.
This option specifies the percentage of time the GPS receiver
will be used as a percentage. If this value is lowered, battery
consumption by the GPS system will be reduced, but less points
will be taken. For example, if this value is set to 10%, then, on
average, the GPS will be turned on for 1 minute during a 10 minute
time period.
The actual length of time that GPS will run at time depends on
the signal strength available. If there is poor or no signal, Tiny
Travel Tracker will turn on the GPS for longer periods of time
with greater intervals in between. For example, considering the
10% setting, if a GPS location isn't found after 15 seconds of
searching, after 150 seconds, 30 seconds of searching will be
attempted. Then the phone will wait for 300 seconds before trying
again with 60 seconds, etc., up to a maximum of 2 minutes of
search time and 20 minutes of rest.
This option will stop Tiny Travel Tracker from taking GPS
readings if the battery life falls below the given percentage.
This prevents the battery from draining too quickly when it is
low.
This determines whether tool tips are displayed on the main
screen when various actions are performed. For example, if tool
tips are enabled, the following message is displayed when the Auto
Zoom button, , is
pressed.
This determines whether Metric units (kilometers, meters, etc.)
or English units (miles, feet, etc.) are displayed for distance
measurements.
This allows you to turn on and off colors used to display the GPS
trail. This may be especially useful if you are colorblind. In
Figure 2.1, below, the colors black, red, orange, and yellow are
chosen
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Figure 2.1 Choose colors screen accessible
from Settings |
This will result in changing the colors of the GPS trail in the
main screen as shown in Figure 2.2, below
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Figure 2.2 The result of setting the colors
to black, red, orange and yellow within the Change Trail
Colors settings option. |
Choosing Enable Password will prompt for a password in order to
view GPS trail data. It must be entered every time the Tiny Travel
Tracker main screen is visited. There is no way to reset the
password if it is forgotten, so be careful setting this. Note that
all GPS points are encrypted when stored on the phone and not
readable by other applications. See the Security section for more
information.
This option will allow you to create a file in the open standard
GPX format for the GPS points stored by Tiny Travel Tracker. If
you select to password protect the file, it will be stored in a
password protected zip file. Otherwise, it will use a regular
unencrypted zip file
This option will restore points from a GPX file located on the
phone's external storage. Note that ALL existing points will be
deleted when this option is used.
Selecting this will allow Tiny Travel Tracker to anonymously
report errors, so that any issues can be looked at and hopefully
fixed.
This option shows the current version of Tiny Travel Tracker
along with all the third party libraries and utilities used. It
also shows the encryption standards used by Tiny Travel Tracker.
If Tiny Travel Tracker is uninstalled, *ALL* GPS points
previously recorded will deleted. If you want to save your
previous GPS points, you must create a backup under Settings, then
Backup / Export to GPX before uninstalling the app.
All GPS data is encrypted and undecipherable outside of the Tiny
Travel Tracker application. If Tiny Travel Tracker is uninstalled,
all GPS point data is deleted from the phone and the private
encryption key is cleared.
Any backup that is created may be done so with a password using
the WinZip 256 bit AES standard. If a password is used, then
encrypted data is written straight to disk without the creation of
a temporary unencrypted file. For more details, see below.
All GPS points are encrypted using a combination of AES and RSA.
In general the encryption length for AES is 256 bits, but this may
be 128 bits depending on your jurisdiction. (To find the number of
bits currently being used, select Settings / About within Tiny
Travel Tracker and scroll to the bottom.) RSA uses 2048 bit
encryption. For AES, we use CBC with PKCS5 Padding and a random
initialization vector for each row.
The basic method is to store an encrypted RSA private key and an
unencrypted RSA public key into private application data (ie.
Shared Preferences). The public key is used to create an AES
symmetric key that is then used to encrypt GPS points and related
information. The reason for the RSA key is to allow the system to
record and encrypt GPS points without having the password
available, which would happen if the phone is rebooted, or the
application is killed. GPS points can still be recorded and
encrypted when the application is in this state, but not decrypted
until a password is entered.
The RSA private key is encrypted using the PBKDF2 standard with
2048 iterations along with a 256 bit salt. If no password is used,
a default password is chosen and data remains encrypted. The
password along with the private and public keys are stored as
internal application preferences and are inaccessible by other
apps on the system (assuming they don't have root).
The encrypted GPS point data and the encrypted AES private keys
are stored in external storage and *are* accessible by
other apps on the system. However, they would need the RSA private
key and salt which are inaccessible, along with the password in
order to decrypt them.