About FrogSparks

After working in the internet/telecom industry for 15 years in technical but non-developer roles, I founded FrogSparks to get back to basics and work on something I loved.

I love going on hikes and rides with my two young boys and athletic wife, and years ago, I threw together an ancestor of MyTrails to display topo maps on my phone and save tracks.

That initial version was already using OpenGL, but it was built in Python (I wanted to learn the language) and ran on Symbian (I was a Nokia employee at the time). That was a strange combination

After a few months I became interested in Android. The first port took only a week, and ran reasonably well on the emulator, so I bought a Galaxy S, and a week later I was able to use MyTrails on it for a hiking weekend!

Since then, I have steadily improved MyTrails, founded FrogSparks to dedicate my time to improving the software and making the best topographical maps available through it.

My 5-year old son often asks to look at the map while we’re on hikes, and I hope in a few years he’ll be in charge of selecting our weekend hikes and navigating the path.