Hi Richard & all,
On a recent bike-camping trip, I used the app exclusively for directions. It worked very well indeed, voice guidance + a quick glance at the screen is all you need. My setup is SE 2nd gen inside Thule handlebar bag, so landscape mode with touchscreen working, but no home & side buttons from outside. Still, I noticed a few points that could be improved, so here are my suggestions :
1) The "reroute/ignore" popup is masking the map. When it's cold & raining, stopping / removing gloves / dismissing the popup / putting gloves / restarting is really no fun. In landscape, just putting the "reroute" button in the lower right of the screen, just after the street name, would be fine. If it's a small obstruction, the user can see the map and turn at a nearby street to get back on track (in essence, that's implicit ignore). If really a reroute is needed, the button is still there in the corner. This is the biggest issue I had.
2) When off-route for more than a few minutes, I tried to "double-tap" to switch the backlight off. Would nicely complement the "double-tap" to wake up the screen when on-route ;-)
3) When rejoining the route, the direction shown / spoken is wrong (it's the direction if we had been on the route already)
4) The ETA is wishful thinking when bike-camping (I hoped it would pull the average speed from my web profile, but nope)
5) In landscape mode, neither the clock nor the battery level are shown. In portrait they both are (might be an OS thing)
Talking about battery life, doing a full day (6+ hours) on a single charge is a stretch. A quick top-up during lunch is the way to go.
Also, as others have noted and you already explained, the routing is fine for daytrips, but when heavily loaded it's a good idea to look for less hilly alternatives, such as https://cycle.travel/by/s_bastien_litaize/cork_passagewest_ferry instead of https://cycle.travel/by/s_bastien_litaize/cork_ferry .
Thanks for the great website & app, I now need to become a supporter.
Comments
To illustrate my suggestions, this is the current situation:
And my proposal:
That’s a really helpful set of suggestions – thank you! Unfortunately losing the time/battery display in landscape is an iOS thing and hasn’t been something that can be disabled since iOS 8 or so – I’m not quite sure why Apple made that choice.
Putting the ‘Reroute’ button there on the landscape display is an interesting idea – I hadn’t thought of that and, yes, there’s plenty of spare space in landscape mode. I’ll have a play around with some layout options.
The ETA does adapt to your speed as you ride along but yes, it would be good if it could take it from your c.t setting – should be doable.
The Cork one is an interesting test case as c.t’s ‘score’ between the two routes is only 5% different! I suspect it’s maybe overstating the elevation for the coastal section of route – the profile shows quite a lot of bobbing up and down on what’s a flat road. I’ll take a look.