More than six years have gone by since we created OwnTracks, and we believe our Open Source Android and iOS apps are quite popular for doing all manner of interesting things.

Christoph has been very diligent on our iOS front, and his latest creation is .. drumroll .. OwnTracks for macOS using Mac Catalyst, a technology that lets app developers build Mac versions of their iPad apps.

I have it running on the Mac I upgraded to Catalina for exactly this purpose (because to be honest, I’d not have done the Catalina thing if it hadn’t been for OwnTracks).

Some of what you see in the screenshot may be new to you, but it’ll be in the next iOS version which is imminent:

• WiFi precision next to the publish arrow on the top right
• different views (satellite, etc.)

So why did Christoph do this? Because he could! But honestly, since Catalyst isn’t 100% like programming for iOS, it has made OwnTracks better because several edge cases were detected and fixed.

Apart from iBeacons and configuration export (configuration publish works) all features in OwnTracks for iOS are in OwnTracks for Mac, and in case you’re wondering you can, of course trigger it to publish programatically:

mosquitto_pub -q 2 -t owntracks/jpmens/tiggr/cmd -m "$(jo _type=cmd action=reportLocation)"

And it’s fun to be able to keep an eye on friends in a small window on my Mac. :-)