The web planner needs some love & development?

[Don Stauffer]

@Stephen-Rowland I appreciated your comments on route planning. My process is very similar, starting with an overall route (7-10+days), identifying interesting roads and scenery. Then the hard work of breaking down individual day rides with reasonable timelines and a decent destination when the day is done. At the end, I often 're-build' the entire route by stringing together the daily routes for future planning purposes.

I agree with others that the Route Planner is the application that is most important to me. My Garmin loads the files I create in MRA, and I use it on the bike and in the car. I really don't use a phone or tablet for serious navigation. I realize that my situation may be different than the typical MRA customer. I live in a very large and diverse country, and my wife and I are both retired. So we enjoy long trips that require a lot of up-front planning.

But I'm content to wait for new feature development, The product continues to evolve. It was better than any of the alternatives that I tried back when I decided to become a lifetime member. I do look forward to more features in the Route Planner. I've suggested a few, and gotten positive responses from the team. You only get that level of interaction from a small, dedicated company. I feel lucky to be their customer!

[Drabslab]

Yes I think we should not forget that the webplanner as it is, already is the best tool out there.

Indeed!

MRA is a small company with 4 programmer hands.

pffff, they ony need to type faster

but let us please give them the time to analyse well. That eventually leads to better development and less bugs.

I agree that a feature freeze on the app would be good, because else it will never be finished.

I can only agree to this and I think that several people here notice a kind of feature creep leading to the typical never ending programming story.

Then developer attention will only be needed for bug fixing,

you are very optimistic here. I was once involved in "correcting a situation" and discovered that nothing was progressing because the developers spent 90% (not a typing mistake) on correcting bugs.

and time will be available for the planner development.

I see that slightly different.

I agree that planner and navigator are two distinct animals with their own purpose and scope, and overlap between the two should too a large extend be avoided.

However, it makes no sense to e.g. improve the planners POI handling, and not making sure immediately (in the same sprint or how is this called these days) that the navigator can exploit these new planning features.

Corjan has responded and I will wait and see.

Me too

[RetiredWingMan]

When I think back to last spring when MyRoute-app exited beta and compare to today's product, what a huge improvement. I look forward to future versions but I wish we could fix some of the long outstanding issues. Ex. Battery usage, Navigation falling behind (possibly related) and general readability of the Here maps.

[Drabslab]

@Doug-Robinson

Very true, and the outstanding issues are beyond the direct influence of MRA. That does not make it less annoying but we have to put responsibility where it belongs.

[Stephen Rowland]

@Don-Stauffer I like and respect your reply. MRA was certainly the best Route Planner I tried before committing to a lifetime gold membership

[Con Hennekens]

@Drabslab said in The web planner needs some love & development?:

I was once involved in "correcting a situation" and discovered that nothing was progressing because the developers spent 90% (not a typing mistake) on correcting bugs.

You would think if 90% of capacity is spent on bugs, that that would lead to less bugs to spent capacity on...

[richtea999]

Just to add my 2 pennies:

• the planner is what brought me here
• the nav app is what keeps me completely hooked

I need both.

But I don't need perfection from the planner. It works well enough for nearly all my uses. I've not found anything close to beating it. So that's a 9.5/10 stars from me.

I do need near-perfection from the nav app. It's what's happening live on the road, and it's not only disconcerting when it doesn't behave, but it can take the shine off a ride for a few minutes whilst you stop (with mates in tow, questioning your sanity) and work out what's happened. Right now it's a 8/10 stars for me, and thus needs the main focus for, say, another 2-3 months.

Considering the app has only been live for 9 months, and it's complexity and integration, it's bloody good.

We just need HERE to pull their finger out and fix the battery drain, plus some online/offline stability, and that will be an easy 9.5/10 for the app.

[Drabslab]

@Con-Hennekens indeed, but they managed to create a new bug for more or less every bug they solved (consequence of totally wrong internal organization, lack of testing ...) so they kept busy chasing their own tail, leading to some drastic management interference, and me be awarded the very "interesting" job of keeping the angry customers at bay and solving the issues.

[Con Hennekens]

@Drabslab, That's a thankful job... I hope you give the MRA team a bit more credit

[Brian McG]

Hi @Peter-3b
I do agree with a lot of what you are saying,
I also find the 200 waypoint limit very frustrating when trying to plan multi-day trips.

Often I plan/ride 500 mile (800km) routes on small non-motorway roads & will have 150+ waypoints for a day, so for a multi-day trip of 10-16 days I can be looking at a trip with several thousand points.

For those that say only 50 points are sufficient for 1 day, that is your choice/preference, some of us prefer a lot more points as we plan far more detailed routes.
IMO there should be no limit on the number of points unless there is a very sound technical reason to impose such a limit, like when importing tracks with 10's or 100's of thousands of points.

You can of course put a bunch of day-trips in a folder and if you don't mind the work (add route -> add route -> add route...)

I agree the "> add route > add route" is painful especially as this action is not cached / saved & if you exit the route you have to go back & "> add route > add route" all over again.
I get round this by having multiple browser tabs open for MRA but this sometimes leads to instabilities in the browser/mra site.

show them at the same time, but that's about as far as MRA goes in supporting multi-day trips.

MRA does allow for prepend / appending the shown routes using the + symbol in the Routes tab after a route has been added.

Unfortunately with detailed routes you soon hit the 200 point limit when you append multiple days. Trying to get an overview of your whole trip & its total mileage is not possible when MRA then randomly removes points.
And yes I want to know the total mileage of a trip as tyre ware & maintenance stops should be planned ( & yes again a new tyre is fitted before a trip)

I understand MRA is a small team & only so much can be done & only so fast, the above is just some pain points I experience with the planner & which I work around.
For planning group trips with multiple riders all using different navigation systems, TomTom, Garmin, MRA, Calimoto...... there is no other app/planner that comes close to being able to successfully create & transfer a route to each of the group & for them then to be able to navigate the days ride.

[Jack van Tilburg]

I am a bit surprised at the number of required route points mentioned here.
I am going to the North Cape this summer and have now planned a route to the north and one to the south. Together more than 6000 kilometers. But no more than 110 waypoints. And that includes shaping points and points along the way for sightseeing and/or overnight stays.
And yes.....I also have day trips in Europe that mainly take very small roads where extra waypoints are needed to carry out the chosen route exactly as I wish. But even there I never reach the number of 100 route points.

[Con Hennekens]

@Brian-McG, I can only imagine that such an exorbitant number of waypoints would lead to an incredibly slow route calculation. I think the problem is in the method, not in the tools.

[Drabslab]

@Jack-van-Tilburg

I suppose you mean 100 routepoints per day? otherwise you have a point every 60 km, and that can hardly be seen as a route?

[richtea999]

@Drabslab said in The web planner needs some love & development?:

... otherwise you have a point every 60 km, and that can hardly be seen as a route?

A route only needs 2 points.

But I can understand why people add superfluous points to a route - it's a distrust of the routing engine to follow the exact same route when actually on the journey.

In my case that distrust originally came from automatic re-routing due to:

• closed roads, and
• traffic

Now that I understand that aspect of the app / routing engine, my routes have a lot less points - 17 over 280 miles for a medium complexity route (start, end, two places to visit on the way, petrol, food, and certain roads I wanted to go down)

You have the option to disable that auto re-routing of course, if you don't like it, or don't trust it.

[Jack van Tilburg]

@Drabslab said in The web planner needs some love & development?:

I suppose you mean 100 routepoints per day

In the sense of my day routes in Europe I indeed mean 100 waypoints.
But I very rarely (or never) reach that number.

[Drabslab]

@richtea999 said in The web planner needs some love & development?:

Now that I understand that aspect of the app / routing engine, my routes have a lot less points

I am not using the app but my old trusted Rider400. The app cooks my phone and I hope that the rider keeps functioning until the battery drain is resolved.

and I rarely follow the route calculated by the planner.

I start with a begin and endpoint, a few POI underway that i want to visit, and then I start tinkering putting waypoints left and right to force the route over a green michelin road, or to avoid the centre of a village...

[Drabslab]

@Jack-van-Tilburg said in The web planner needs some love & development?:

I indeed mean 100 waypoints. But I very rarely (or never) reach that number.

same for me

[Brian McG]

I thought about adding a long reply explaining why its fine for some use cases to only require a few points but that there are other occasions, like when planning routes for large groups where multiple different "engines"/navigation devices will be used, then more points are required.... etc etc etc...

But this just made me laugh .....
The planned route above takes what I would say is the expected logical path between points 1 & 2,
click the Navigate button & ....

the route/path is re-calculated

I understand that different engines/routing algorithms can calculate different paths & there is probably a perfectly logical reason for the difference in this case. I do not expect a fix.

I just thought it was hilarious that within the same app it can display one path & then on the next screen show a different path
& this is why I prefer to use more points to "constrain" the engines/algorithms to the path I want to take.

So for a route similar to the above, where there are different possible paths that the engine/algorithms might choose, I would normally place an additional point somewhere between 1 & 2 to prevent the strange path the engines sometimes decide to take.
This simple control of the engines/algorithms obviously uses more points

[RetiredWingMan]

@Brian-McG it looks to me like the planner took the shortest route while the navigation chose what may be the fastest route. I think car routing can select shortest or fastest routing.

[Vincent Curren]

Just to add my two cents to an already lengthy discussion...

I'm a simple guy. I like simple tools. The navigator is very important to me. I no longer have to fool around with my Garmin, gpx files, Kurviger, Osmand, etc., etc... wow, so much better for me. My phone runs fine, although I would be happy to cook it anyway. (I pay a few dollars a month to Google to replace it if that happens... or if it falls off the bike and bounces along the ground... etc.

The one thing about the app that is less than ideal is that it is often a bit behind me... it's less than ideal to know where I >was< than where I am about to be. And I recognize that the issue may be with an outside provider.

Our pals at MRA have a great product as well as a business that they need to run profitably. I want them to be profitable, so they are here tomorrow as well as today.

So I think all of this input is good, but once given, I might suggest that we have the confidence in our MRA friends to make the best decisions and trade-offs to keep their product attractive, their user base growing, and their company profitable!

Vinnie