I am publicly committing to developing “TideMonkey,” a tide-prediction application that will run on (at least) iOS and watchOS.
TideMonkey will be based on Xtide, an excellent piece of software developed by David Flater. At the moment, my hope is that it will be a very loose port, or what Flater refers to as a “non-port” that reuses the harmonics files of Xtide but is otherwise only loosely based on the source code. On the other hand, I know virtually nothing about the domain, so it is likely that I will have to hew pretty closely to Xtide’s algorithms, at least initially. Ideally I would like to be able to plugin different algorithms and compare their results with the canonical Xtide. Neural nets are a particular interest of mine and one would think that a harmonic series would be the type of thing that one could successfully train (if this ever happens, it won’t be for months and months and months).
I am battling the urge to dive right into coding. Instead, I know that I will be happy by investing in:
- automation, and
- testing, and
- continuous integration
All of which argues for me to begin my journey by getting Xtide, which is written in C++, up and running in a CI server. For no particular reason (but it’s free for personal use) I’ve chosen to use TeamCity for my CI server.
Hmm…
There are several Xtide ports on Github to iOS or Android. The first one I tried was last updated in 2013 and doesn’t run on iOS 9 (it looks like a simple permissions issue, but it doesn’t run “straight from the cloud” and I don’t know if I want to deal with a port rather than just go with the original “straight from the horse’s mouth” Xtide source.
At the moment, I think I’ll work all inside the single “TideMonkey” Github repo. I’ll have to check license restrictions on that, and I don’t know how it will work out once the project structure starts to become more complicated, with testing and mobile development as part of it.
Still,
Creating TideMonkey Github report
MIT License