Hi Richard, please let me know if you’d prefer to receive feedback through the in-app mechanism.
It would be helpful (for me) if the “distance to next turn” countdown was more prominent on screen. I am far-sighted, and even with the largest iPhone this text is too small and lightweight. (However, I can appreciate it’s difficult to balance font size and fitting everything across all ranges of screen sizes.) In terms of information hierarchy, at that moment the “distance to turn” and street name are all I really care about.
The tap targets in the top right for re-centering (arrow) and map options could be larger or separated a bit more. It’s fussy to tap to re-center.
Sometimes the name of a street is read in a strong German (?) accent. For example, Birse street here. It seems a rarity and is mostly a curiosity, but I thought I’d mention it. The street name can be hard to understand in these cases, but it is clearly displayed anyway.
The app is super - and I’m really happy it exists. Nice work! 👏
Comments
I’ll give the “distance to next turn” distance some thought – I wonder if it might be possible to make it a bit larger without breaking the current layout too much. I’ll have a play. Agreed on the top-right buttons – that’s on my list to sort!
The app uses Apple’s logic for working out what language a street name is in, coupled with a bit of a steer for the part of the world – i.e. in NZ it should be more likely to reckon English than German! But in this case it looks like it’s misjudging it. That should be an interesting test case so thanks for that!
Thanks Richard.
This journey will crash the app when I try to load it. I can use the GPX export for the website as a workaround for today. But I though you’d want to know.
Enhancement request:
After using the app in some remote areas, I think my top request is that the active journey state be more resilient. More than once I’ve found my active journey to be “forgotten” after I use other apps on the phone. I speculate that this happens due to iOS purging memory for background apps (but I am not a developer).
In areas with poor/no network coverage there is no way to get back to the active journey.
Workarounds: the offline map can be used for simple routes that I’ve memorized. Or, export a GPX at the beginning of the day to another mapping app, as a fallback.
Steps to replicate:
Thanks for the detailed steps – that’s really useful and gives me something to test against!
One of the “when the Android app’s done” things on my list is to make it possible to automatically sync your routes from the website to the app, so that you can download all your routes when you have network coverage, and they’re still accessible when you don’t. I think it would be reasonably easy to fix this issue as part of this – it’s essentially the same thing of enabling routes to be stored on the phone.
Thanks Richard! That sounds like a great future enhancement.
A related enhancement request: could the elevation profile be loaded when the route is loaded (and thus network connectivity is known to exist)?
More than once I’ve been on a route, wanted to see the elevation profile, swiped up, realized the elevation profile had never loaded - and I was out of network coverage. I survived 😉 but it’d be a nice-to-have enhancement.
Just a comment, not a request, for once: I used the app last night in a new city, in the rain, in the dark, at rush hour, and I felt very comfortable knowing the app and your routing engine were on my side. It chose a good route over bike paths and lanes, naturally.
That’s really good to hear. 😊
Interesting idea on elevation. I’ve erred on the side of caution in fetching the elevation because it’s fairly server-intensive, but I managed to tamp that down a couple of months back so there should be a bit more headroom. Might be something I could put in the next version of the app, perhaps. (Ultimately we should be able to use downloaded offline maps to always have elevation accessible, but that’ll be a lot more work!)