Canadian Rocky Mountain Adventures. Kananaskis is located 45 minutes west of Calgary. The vast majority of my activity is in this beautiful area.
The original Thin Air homepage.
Version 3.0
A major backend rewrite in 2020 focused on upgrading to Python3, Django 3.x and database technology. Python code is now minimized and Google Datastore has been eliminated in favor of simpler Google Sheets API.
Version 2.0
Thin Air combines my interests in technology, application development, web, mobile and the mountains. It has been created to keep track of my personal hiking and scrambling adventures in the Canadian Rockies.
Thin Air uses the following core technologies:
Development takes a mobile-first approach and is entirely web based; leveraging standards-based HTML, CSS and a minimal amount of Javascript. No proprietary technologies were ever considered. Care has been taken to provide a quality End User Experience independant of device. Any smartphone, including but not limited to iOS, Android, Microsoft, Blackberry etc should work. The latest and greatest versions are NOT required. The only requirement is a web browser. Most features that leverage more modern technology like Javascript or Scalable Vector Graphics have been designed with fallbacks. Of course, tablets and laptops should work equally well. The UI intentionally tries to be somewhat minimalistic. Of course, extensive testing has been done on as many devices as possible.
In 2014, a relatively significant re-write of much of the application code base was undertaken - primarily as an exersize in increasing mobile web-based application performance. The results were interesting!
In addition, a new basic photo album function was written to support the blog entries. The rationale was the Google + album performs poorly on smartphones and doesn't work at all if the device is not Javascript-enabled. The goal was to provide the photos as quickly as possible to the user without an abundance of fancy performance robbing UI code to download and execute. Check out the performance differences for an interesting comparision.
