@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
@Hans-van-de-Ven-MRA-Master I am not a graphical designer, my programming skills were honed back in times where a computer delivered "output" under form of "listings" which were endless lengths of paper with a chain of small holes left and right to pull that paper through the printer.
Anything better than that is fine in my book
Bu that aside, i kind of like that those buttons, they have a joly look. I would however love to see the pop up a bit different. When it opens, halve of the buttons are hidden and one needs to pushh the "triangle with three dots" to open it up fully. I would hugely prefer to see all buttons in one go.
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
@Mr-Mark-Melbourne said in Lifetime Membership:
get money every month
Getting money every month is what keeps our household affloat, and it ensures that companies like MRA stay in business.
Hoi Hans,
Ik wil deze twee niet speciaal open hebben om te reageren en ik begrijp uw idee om ze af te sluiten omdat de issue is opgelost.
Ik heb mijn vraag enkel gesteld omdat het blokkeren van een thread meestal nogal negatief wordt bekeken als een admin reactie op een discussie die uit de hand loopt, of als een admin ingreep om te voorkomen dat kritiek op de site/bedrijf... kan geuit worden. Ik begrijp van MRA genoeg om te weten dat dit hier niet het geval is maar ...
Misschien is het beter om bij een compleet beantwoorde vraag een "solved" vlagje te zetten maar toch nog toe te laten dat iemand nog bijkomende vragen/reacties kan plaatsen?
This is a simple community of people who use the same tool to navigate and travel, share idea's and interesting routes, and where possible try to help one another. It works fairly well, and it is fairly unique that it is sponsored by a commercial endeavour that finds "community" really important.
It is very easy to take advantage of a constructive attitude. It is even more easy to misread answers and claim a "victory" for making people angry, even when hat supposed anger only exists in your own imagination.
Anyway, as an "IT guy by trade" it must be very easy for you to figure out the basics on your own. Good luck.
If you count on the MRA "avoid highway" option (or any other option for that matter) then it can go wrong because a GPS device with different settings can still interprete the resulting GPX file completely different.
In my humble opinion, the best way to make a route is to put sufficient waypoints on the whole route and that can include putting some waypoints on a highway. The options in the routeplanner toolbox do not influence the settings of a GPS device.
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