@Nick-Carthew-RouteXpert
I just looked at your "El Grande" route. Impressive from two viewpoints:
My God, what a trip
What a fantastic preparation, you are really putting a lot of time preparign and documenting your journeys. A real showcase of what is possible with MRA
I notice that novice users are sometimes struggling with the most simple things like how to make a route public.
Obviously, that is lack of experience, in combination with impatience to start using the system without going through the complete support site, but it is also a consequence of having difficulties finding the info.
So, I would like to put a request for the GSList to simplify and make coherent the user interface again.
Are you doing the same? I mean, constructing the most fabulous tours and holidays in MRA, looking at roads and points of interests in area's you've never been, dreaming of months on the road...
Corona boredom has strange effects, for sure
Idon't know whether the following qualifies as "discussion of the list itself, its' structure and possibly its' level of accuracy" as I am basically adding to the list but I have the following additional requests:
A download option for all our routes in one go, respecting the folder structure, as backup
Integration of our MRA account and profile, and the forum account and profile with options to decide what we want to make public and what not
I fully support your request. I use MRA as well to organise, from the comfort of my big screen PC, all trips for a weeks holiday or travelling.
Being able to calculte stop times at a point of interest would be big plus :-:+1:
Hai Brian,
I live in Belgium, a small country (10 million people) in Europe, and we are also at the leading edge of the disease. Government has taken the drastic decision to more or less shut down the entire economy. Many factories are closed. I have an office job and am working from home since a week.
We don't know where this virus will lead us. In Italy, it's devastating, and I hope our government has reacted fast enough and we don't end up with 3000+ deaths in Belgium as well, but we don't know, we can only follow the instructions of the government and hope for the best.
We have one huge advantage here in Belgium that despite our political system being the laughing stock of the rest of Europe, we do have one of the best health care and social security systems of the planet. Survive without a job means that you fall back on a minimum monthly income guaranteed and paid by by the government.That unemployment beneftit won't make you rich, but is certainly enough to survive and a bit more than that. Health insurance organised by the government will cover 70-90% of all costs related to hospitalisation and medicine, and the government has today announced fairly massive measures such as 1 billion euro allocated to support the hospitals (on the scale of a 10 million people population, that is a lot), granting delays to companies for paying their taxes, give very cheap loans to companies ... whatever it takes to keep economy alive basically.
Add to that the measures taken by the European Union and I think (hope) that economically speaking we are as safe as we can be under the given circumstances. Yes, companies will close, some poeple will lose thier job and the stock market is going down, and after the crisis it will go up again, as always.
The big worry is whether we, and our family, will stay healthy, or get sick and maybe die.
Compared to that, all the rest is fairly irrelevant. These days in Italy, where the disease is rampaging at full speed, people die simply becuse there are no beds free anymore in the hospitals, and no more oxigen masks, and the doctors are as ill as their patients. If I would be in a position to give advice to you and your customers: first take care of yourself and your loved ones, and then for your community. Stay home, stay alone, don't go to restaurants, or warehouses... forget about business... survive, and then pick up the pieces.
Feel free to disagree, I wholeheartedly hope that I am totally wrong and in two weeks time all this will prove to be a massive hoax but today, it does not look like that.
All the best.
There are recently a few difficulties with MRA. Users reporting "holes" in their routes, downloads that don't work anymore ...
Its the consequence of a the very volatile environment that MRA is working in. MRA is depending on Google, and Here, and .... who all have their own commercial and development/bug fixing path and can make changes that impact the functioning of MRA. There is also the development path of MRA itself and god knows how easy it is to program one new function that upsets a range of old and trusted existing functions.
And then there is the almighty user who innocently and on the fly invents the most incredible ways to discover and exploit any bug or weakness that even the most methodical testers can't discover. It shows the need for programmers to maintain an unwavering cool in addressing the most exotic errors. It definitively shows how much we take for granted that every function simply works, all the time.
The recent hick-ups just underline how good it all is, I am impressed.
This suggestion was triggered by several discussions on the forum which all came down to having an option of drawing a circle on a map of a given diameter (expressed in kilometers/miles) around a central point.
Potential uses:
setting a maximum length of a trip
finding points of interest within walking distance
finding a hotel within a given range
@TJ-Higgins the satelite layer from Here is still there, it may (zoomed out) not look so nice but once you zoom in it is ok
@Dragbert Hai Dagbert,
In Belgium, we cope (ore or less) and the number of cases fluctuates at the same pace as the goverment strengthens or weakens the anti-corona measures.
Unfortunately, we also have a bunch of idiots that ignore all measures, or even worse, use the situation to organise riots at public places.
Otherwise, covid also gives opportunities to do those things we have in our "todo backpack" since a long time; My garden has never been so polished
Hence, it is what it is and making the best of it in a safe way is what it takes
First, don't worry about sounding patronizing, when staying polite, one can say anything (almost )
Second, I have some experience with software development as business owner, business analyst ... of a few major developments and what you are escribing above sounds quite familiar
Voting (or "liking" to use more recent terminology) on feature requests indeed is not the golden bullet but it can be part of a priorisation strategy. It could allow to determine if a feature request is the wet dream of a single person, or whether it is broadly shared by the larger user base.
At some moment in time I used this together with complaint frequency, and "known bug" lists to identify priority clusters for development or evolutive maintenance. You may say that you already know where the issues are. I originally thought the same but structuring that knowledge gave very useful insights, resulting in increased efficiency, nevertheless.
I am however negative towards a "community decision board". It is the developer/owner of the software that should decide. On the other hand, involving users in analysing a functional area before programming starts may be a must have. In my experience, people who know their business (in this case travel and routing) even when having absolutely no IT knowledge, can add huge value in describing what they need. Then it is up to the technicians to decide the how.
Anyway, it is not up to me to tell you how to manage MRA, and that is most probably a very good thing too
I agree that a bug list is best kept internal on condition that bugs are fixed within a reasonable amount of time, otherwise user frustration will fill the forums, and not only the MRA forum
In first instance you don't need a fancy tool. Making/maintaining it will cost resources that are lost for the core business, and that fancy tool (for internal use only) will impose itself preventing the company from moving on to better working methods.
Also, I would be careful bringing too much concrete info on the (future) functioning of MRA to a completely open forum. You should probably not be helping the competition to write their functional analysis.
wow, that is a totally unexpected pleasure.
Thanks a lot
@Timo-Martosatiman-MRA said in Favorites en point of interest:
@Drabslab Thank you for sharing your insights, I'm adding this to The Great Suggestion list as a viable suggestion for an overall POI/Favorites rework. This specific scenario doesn't ring a bell, however, rest assured that at the office we've talked quite a lot about the complexity of having different types of points (POI, Fav, Waypoint, Stop point, etc) and using their behavior to the fullest within Navigation, TomTom, Here and all other navigation devices.
In my opinion, a point of interest is nothing but a waypoint stored outside a route and identified by its coordinates, and probably for the sake of human readability, an address, a short title, and a few other standard elements.
In addition, it can have a series of tags allowing to put it into categories the same way as it is common for photos.
Filling in those tags will always have an element of subjectivity. For instance, I may consider my address as “home” while all others mark it as “stay away from there” 
A minimum set of tags should be obligatory when entering a poi:
• Public/private: this poi is for personal use only, or, this poi can come on the public list for everyone to see
• General/specific: this tag is always relevant for me (favorite?) or this poi is only relevant for me for this particular trip.
• A type from a limited drop down list (garage, pass, hotel, museum …)
• And personal tags that also may go public (airplanes, excellent, …)
The usual problems with tagging will also apply here: difficult to have a coherent set of tags, and simple enough as not to create a heap of admin for all users.
This should not prevent this point from getting a specific role in a trip such as point of departure, arrival …
@Jeffrey-Kogler There are plenty of methods in MRA to avoid having to manually move waypoints. The big point is that you should do the effort to learn about these methods and many other handy perks that come with MRA. The training video's are one way to do this, just playing around with MRA is another.
A. Most of the waypoints I put on the road when preparing a tip are just that, a waypoint, and at that moment I do not care what name it has, this may come later in the route making process when I am closer to finalising the trip.
Hence, could we please remove the pop-up at waypoint creation that reads “What do you want to call this waypoint?” and just call it “waypoint” . The option to rename the waypoint is already in the pop up clicking in the “waypoints” menu and it is annoying having to click confirm all the time.
B. Could we get a magnifying glass on the route page to help putting our waypoints exactly on the road with web MRA.
I dream of something like: with the magnifying glass option enabled, I click on the road where I want to set a way point, immediately a magnifying glass (2? centimetre diameter) pops up and gives me a 20? meter circle around my click, I click again on the exact spot where I want the waypoint, the magnifying glass disappears, and the waypoint is set.
That would kill the cumbersome and time consuming process of verifying if each waypoint is exactly on the road, and not in the river next to it (I can’t swim very well, and my motorcycle can’t either).
@Jeffrey-Kogler hai,
the appropriate place IS the end of the route from the software point of view but you can simply move the waypoint up to fit between two other waypoints by dragging and dropping in the menu on the left side in web MRA.
May I propose to spend an hour or two learnig how MRA works, just look at the video's and then make a test route and experiment with all available options and buttons. Your enthoesiasm will go up considerably after that.
Honestly, as long as the points that I search by entering the address in the "find a place" box are stored with the adress (which is still the case ) I am not concerned.
The other waypoints are just to force my GPS to follow the roads that I select, not for visiting them. A neutral "wapoint" name may even be better than a whole address when considered like that...
But this may raise the significance of my favorites/POI ideas 