I have just returned from a 3500 kilometer ride through the Netherlands, Spain and France, using the Cycle.Travel app for the entire trip.
The suggested routes are fine and the app is good, but I had some issues:
Here are my wishes:
1. The function "look ahead" works fine, but if you touch the screen (accidentally or after zooming in for a while to be able to orientate properly), you have to set/click it again. I would like it to be fixed after selection.
2. The spoken instructions go in all directions... the basics are English and depending on the country where you cycle you will hear a female or male voice. In border areas it's a complete mess ;-)
3. I regularly cycle with music on my helmet (sena M1 smart helmet). Then I turn off the spoken instructions, so as not to receive instructions through my music every time.
In the off position you will (of course) not receive any instructions, but the music will dim at a point where - in the on position - there would be a clue.
Thank you!
Comments
Thank you – a 3500km trip is absolutely the best testing one could want for an app and I’m glad it found good routes for you!
On the spoken instructions: by default the iPhone will announce everything in English, and this is what most routing apps do. But as you can imagine, a phone trying to pronounce “Székesfehérvár” as an English word isn’t very successful.
cycle.travel tries to improve on this by choosing a language based on the country you’re in and the ‘look’ of the placename. Generally this gives better results but sometimes it struggles – particularly, as you’ve noticed, in border areas. I’m continually fine-tuning it but if you have a particular example that I can use as a test, that’d be great.
(I think that the male/female thing basically depends on what voices you have loaded on your iPhone. if you only have a male French voice loaded, for example, then cycle.travel will probably prefer “Place de la République” in a male voice to “Place dee lah Ree-publi-queue” in a female voice. You should be able to load more voices by going to System Settings > General > Accessibility > Speech > Voices.)
On the screen touches thing – absolutely understood. I’m not quite sure what to do about that – given that (for example) you want to be able to zoom in, I can’t turn screen touches off completely. But I’ll give it some thought.
I think there’s a bug with the music dimming but haven’t been able to track it down yet – will investigate!