Staff Reports

We recently ran a code counting tool on our iOS source code, because we were trying to estimate how long rewriting our Android app will take. Since the numbers are mildly interesting, I thought I would share the results on the blog.

Gaia GPS and related apps end up being about 70K lines of “real” code, or 30% more if you count comments and whitespace and such. About 20,000 lines of code applies to one of five specific apps (like Gaia GPS vs. Offline Topo Maps), and about 50,000 lines of code is the core platform that all our apps share.

• 22158 view_controllers objc=22158
• 20470 apps objc=20470
• 18099 controllers objc=14078,ansic=4021
• 7562 top_dir objc=7562
• 4353 views objc=4353
• 4334 util objc=4334
• 3311 data objc=3311

There are also some estimates provided by the “sloccount” tool on how long all of this took. It’s a very rough estimate, but it’s not totally off the mark from our own back-of-the-envelope calculation.

• Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 22.59 (271.08)
• (Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))
• Schedule Estimate, Years (Months) = 1.75 (21.01)
• (Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))
• Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule) = 12.90
• Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 3,051,635
• (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).
• SLOCCount, Copyright (C) 2001-2004 David A. Wheeler

If you are an iOS developer, you can count your code from the Terminal too:

• brew install sloccount
• sloccount MY_DIR

In the June issue of Backpacker, the magazine incorrectly reported on the features in Gaia GPS for iOS. Backpacker claimed that Gaia GPS did not sync user trips between devices. This false claim was made in an infographic, which attempted to compare Backpacker GPS Trails favorably to Gaia GPS.

We wanted to post this correction on our website to get the maximum exposure. Here is the infographic, properly corrected. You can probably tell why Backpacker wouldn’t want to print it this way:

When we contacted them, Backpacker let us know they would correct this in the online version, but they did not say they would print a retraction. So unfortunately, all of Backpacker’s print subscribers will be left with false information. Here is the original, bogus graphic:

I want to end this on a personal note. Before I went into programming, I almost became a reporter, after working at my college paper as news editor, and then editor-in-chief. It makes me sad that a publication as venerable as Backpacker can’t be bothered to check facts, nor to print corrections when they are appropriate – this type of anti-journalism wouldn’t have happened even at my college rag.

I think Backpacker’s editorial missions has been corrupted by the urge to sell their own apps, and the publication is not a trustworthy source of information about apps for hiking. Buyer beware.

Welcome to the new blog or Gaia GPS. We decided to switch to a WordPress-based blog, because it became to time consuming and expensive to use our own hand-rolled bogging solution. Our old blog is still live and archived here.

Using WordPress gives us all sorts of widgets like comment functionality, social sharing, search, and other things that our previous blog lacked. It’s always sort of been a side project of mine to make the software under our blog, but I just can’t keep up with a good platform.