I have just returned from a 1,300 mile ride through England, Spain and France during which I relied heavily on the Cycle.Travel website for safe routing and on the app for navigation. The routing is outstanding for bicycle touring and the app is very good but could be improved Here are my suggestions:
1. The route that is available directly from the home screen should be the one most recently opened on the current device (not the one most recently created or edited on the website).
2. Clicking on Routes button should reopen the most recently opened folder (instead of always going back to top level).
3. Allow user to sort routes alphabetically or by time last opened on current device.
4. Provide button on map for switching orientation between North up and Heading up.
5. Allow direction announcements to be both on-screen *and* spoken
6. Make it easier to adjust volume of spoken announcements. (My attempts generally resulted in adjustment of iPhone’s *ringer* volume.)
7. Partner with Hammerhead to support synchronization of routes (similar to existing “Send to Garmin Connect” option).
Thank you, and keep up the good work!
Comments
Thanks – really useful feedback! I’ll give all of that some thought.
Hammerhead don’t as yet offer an API for uploading routes (nor do Wahoo). I wish they did.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by point 5 – if you have spoken announcements, they do appear at the bottom of the screen as well. But I might be missing something!
Many thanks for following up on my suggestions.
My point 5 might be a non-issue if I can figure out how to increase the spoken volume (see point 6).
I'd very much appreciate @bespoke's points 4 (switch orientation) and 6 (adjust volume). I too have trouble with iPhone volume control in general, but other apps seem to be able to seize control of the volume buttons.
Might I also suggest increasing the size of the "locate me" button at the top right? I often fiddle with the map scale while riding, and find it a bit tricky to centre the map afterwards because the button is rather small.
An alternative could be to auto-zoom the map at junctions. Apologies if that's been suggested before; this otherwise excellent forum could really do with a search function :-)
Just trying to work out the volume thing; on your iPhone system settings, under ‘Sounds & Haptics’, do you have ‘Change with Buttons’ enabled or disabled?
Aha. It was enabled. Now I've disabled it, pressing the buttons when cycle.travel is active no longer says it's affecting the ring volume, so I guess it will apply to the spoken directions instead. Excellent, especially since I usually have no need to change the ring volume and hate altering it by accident.
However, this does seem a bit non-standard compared to other apps. So it might be worth changing if you can work out how.
Yes, that worked. This is a wonderful app :-)
I like Charles's suggestion of auto-zooming the map at intersections... although I suspect this might be challenging to implement in a seamless way.
Would it be possible to have the option of showing a compass arrow instead of the green dot? Many other mapping apps do this, and since I have a poor sense of direction I find it helpful when I'm stationary and confused about which way to head off.
Interesting idea! Do you have a screenshot of something that does this?
On auto-zooming at junctions… believe it or not that’s half-written; I did a whole bunch of code to do exactly that, but it doesn’t yet work reliably, so I disabled it for the first versions of the app. I’ll resuscitate it when I can get it to work properly!
Here are the iOS Ordnance Survey app and Apple Maps. The OS red arrow and Apple's blue fan shape ("I'm looking in this direction") both follow the direction that the phone is pointing. Since the phone has a built-in compass, I'm guessing it's an iOS function, and perhaps not a very complicated one to use?
"…auto-zooming … doesn’t yet work reliably"
– Brilliant to hear that you've been working on this. In due course it will be very welcome, but I'm sure you have a million other jobs and I for one am happy to wait until you are happy with it.