I read an article recently about launching a bunch of mini-apps to grow some traction. I’m not sure that these things will grow traction for me. I more wanted an excuse to work on small apps that I thought were cool. I am building everything under the OpenPace branding and website so they are all open source.

The first mini-app that I built is called namer. I built it because I have been doing a lot of different activities on my Garmin 935. I start the timer when I sit down on my yoga mat for class and quickly switch it to the watch face that only has the time. I don’t want other people in my yoga class to know that I am obsessed with tracking every activity in my life. This is supposed to be a time for zen and meditation.

Whenever Strava imports my yoga session, the activity is always named “Morning Activity” (or sometimes “Evening Activity” if I do an after-work yoga class). Looking down the list of my Strava activities, everything takes the same form. Morning Activity, Lunch Run, Evening Activity.

I built namer to make these activities a bit more descriptive. The logic isn’t very complicated. I add an emoji based on the type of activity. I add the distance or duration of the workout. And I replace the plain “Activity” with your actual activity like yoga.

Here are some of my recent renamed activities with namer:

• Afternoon Activity → 🧘 1h 09m Afternoon Yoga
• Morning Run → 🏃 4.7 mi Morning Run

If you have any suggestions on ways to make this better, please add a GitHub issue or, even better, a pull request.