First of all, congratulations on the site. Well thought out, the route and city guides are very helpful, and the map styling is without a doubt the best I've encountered anywhere. If only I could get that clarity on my GPS...
There are a couple of things though that I wanted to raise:
- If I want to export a route to GPS, I have to save it. When I save it, it is published to the broader community (I didn't notice a warning that this would happen). For a lot of my rides, this won't be a problem. For some, however, I'm riding from a train station to a friend's private address - something I don't particularly want to disclose. Now, I know I can get around this by going back in and deleting the published route, but this seems a bit cumbersome when having a "Public/Private" flag on the route would be much simple. Defaulting to "Public" would probably go a long way to achieving the original goal of building the community and a variety of routes
- Adding "Via" points in planning is not at all intuitive. Sometimes I get one added when I'm trying to re-do a route with different start/end points, other times when I want to add one I can't work out how to. Perhaps offering a right-click menu on the map with "Drop start point", "Drop via point", and "Drop end point" (and dynamic adding of the relevant fields to the menu on the LHS would make this simpler? Alternatively, or in addition, adding a simple "Click to add via point" on the LH pane could also simplify this
- In a related manner, changing a start/end point using clicking on the map (rather than typing address/LatLon/postcode) is equally tricky. I never know which point is going to change, and, as the points are displayed as Lat/Lon when selected by clicking, I've no idea which is which without resetting my brain to interpret Lat/Lon...
Overall though, a great piece of work that I'm actually enjoying using, rather than feeling I'm constantly fighting against. Well done, and thank you!
Comments
Thanks for the comments - really useful stuff!
I've just reworked the GPX download such that (assuming you have a recent-ish browser) you no longer need to save the route first. Hopefully this'll be useful; in the medium term public/private is definitely a good idea.
Over the past few days, a lot of the via point handling has changed too, and hopefully you'll find this a bit more intuitive. The start/end points now appear distinctly (start is green, end is red with a chequered flag) and the via points are numbered. You can add a via point either by just dragging the route, or by clicking it and choosing 'add via point', then dragging that.
But I suspect there might be more that could/should be done, particularly in the area of extending the route. Let me know how it works for you!
Richard,
Sorry for the delay in responding - I've been away with work and then on a short tour from Croatia (Pula) round to Venice. Planning that on Garmin's Basecamp with OFM made me realise just how much I'd come to appreciate cycle.travel for UK planning!
Great to hear some changes have already been made, I'll post more feedback as I continue to use the site.
Colin