The Bike Companion

The Bike Companion is a freely customizable Trip Computer for bicycles. It is designed to make your daily bike rides more fun (be it training, be it biking to your office and back).

Why is it special? For example,

- it keeps track of your total stats like distance, highest speed ever, total time spent biking
- for some reason I personally find it rewarding to know that since I started regularly biking with it, I've saved 95 kg of carbon dioxide by using bike instead of car
- it shows pop-ups when you achieve something special, like a big shock or your if you've gained the height of the empire state building on a trip.
- you can bike against past trips on the same track; the Bike companion will constantly show you how well you're doing (how many meters / yards are you ahead or behind?) incl. intermediates, ETA of the ghost, stats to how the ghost is doing right now.
- and of course it contains a lot of information you might want to see while biking.

Currently it features 54 different pieces of information that you can place freely on a grid on your phone's screen. If you wish, you can also let some of these tiles cycle between multiple bits of information, showing each for one second.

You can choose if you want to get frequent GPS updates (at the expense of battery life) or if you only want to receive a new GPS update every 30 seconds and have your battery last longer until the next charge.

Information can be displayed as text, as a horizontal bar (if that makes sense), or as a graph showing the values of the last few minutes (if that makes sense). You can freely choose how to display information.

Whenever you achieve something special (your first kg of CO2 saved, the first 100 km biked), the Bike Companion will inform you in a pop-up about that. You can take a look at details on all your past achievements whenever you want. New special achievements will also be shown as a notification on the status bar of your phone.

If you've recorded a trip, you can send its GPS info via e-mail, and look at your trip later in e.g. bikemap.net.

Explanation of Permissions the app needs:
* internet access: needed for a feature that gives you more information on a recorded trip: it shows you up to four cities you've been through. For this, unfortunately, the app needs a call to a google service.
* write external storage: needed only for the new mail feature, attaching a GPX file with your trip coordinates to a mail. The GPX file is written to a temporary location which needs this permission.
* wake lock: so that the display doesn't go dark while you're biking
* access location / fine location: so that the app gets GPS data

There is a free version and a pro version. New features are always added to the pro version first, and come to the free version a few weeks or months later. You can upgrade to pro by purchasing my "Androidicus Token" on google Play. There's a menu in the app that brings you there. It costs a whole buck.

Currently, the pro version has one additional feature: day statistics: nter a date range and find out how much you've biked on every day in that range (time, distance, calories, average speed). The data are visualized as text and innovatively as bar graphics below the text, covered by the semi-transparent table.