Yesterday, I was planning one hiking route after the other. At that point some small nuisances become gradually more accentuated and feel like inefficiencies.

1. First waypoint = user choice instead of the default = your location

When planning hikes or bike or road trips, WindyMaps assumes the current location is the starting position. When planning routes this is often not the case. Then the current location becomes a (small) nuisance. Certainly when you’re planning routes far away from your current location. You get a superfluous zoom out and zoom in.

May consider putting the option per type of transport (car, bike, feet).
In short:

route start option, start new route from:

• my location
• first waypoint setting

2. Less taps to define a route:
   The GoTo feels like a superfluous action when you don’t make use of predefined waypoints. Why not assume that each tap ‘n hold is a new waypoint? Now you need one tap ‘n hold + GoTo tap. It’s a larger nuisance then the one mentioned above. When afterwards you consider a waypoint to be wrong, you can always delete it.

The nearest hospital also includes hospitals with a special purpose. They won’t help, and will send you to a general hospital.

When I try to insert a waypoint via the route planning list (whee you can tap the green +), for example the addition of a new waypoint between waypoint 2 and 3, I get a new End waypoint (on iPad). The route gets messed up.

The route weather & time option is really very interesting when hiking in mountains, especially when weather or corporal conditions start to play a role in considering what to do next: return, continue, rest, or hopefully not the need to call for help.

Here are some suggestions to improve this interesting feature.

• I suggest to put a weather toggle icon on top of the navigation list instead of the switch with (imho superfluous) explanation. It’s faster, and self explaining when you hit the icon.

• An extra toggle icon, let’s call it for now waypoint info, to display the same info, next to height on waypoint level. Height is sometimes difficult to derive from contour lines. The first icon remains interesting though when there are few waypoints.

• Maybe join both icons into one. Tap once for route weather & time, tap once again for route waypoint weather & time & height, tap once again to put it off.

• Consider to let the user adjust the gap between route weather points for example every 500 m in distance or every 100 m in height.

• Consider to add a “tap a waypoint on the map to get more info”. In fact the same brief data, as above (including height of course :) ), but only for the tapped waypoint. Tap again and the info disappears.

• Please add height to what I call info waypoints, showing now the weather forecast next to gps info. I suggest to display the same data as the route weather, next to height of course next o the info waypoint.

• Finally, I support an earlier suggestion to add current height (maybe as an option) somewhere at the bottom or on top of the screen.

@harryc @Korina
A glitchrich tracking day. XR in airplane mode. WindyMaps running in foreground.

The walk today delivered a tracking stop after making a 90° turn (again). I have to mention we turned from walking along the edge of a forest (South to North) into the forest (East to West). See picture 1. After a while tracking went on again, but the glitch is clearly visible.

I handheld the XR for a while and saw the tracker going from tracking mode to non-tracking mode while I was walking and vice versa, several times. The app linked the broken pieces together, one by one of course. Note that this walk was within the forest, mainly consisting of deciduous trees, i.e. large beech and oak trees, without leaves, but also pines, so it looks possible that gps glitches are the cause. However, what I don’t understand, is that the blue tracker symbol kept following my pace, also during the time the top of the screen turned reddish (=waiting for movement). After a 20 to 50 meters, the top of the screen turned green again (=tracing movement) and the app nicely linked the blue maker to the where the tracer line was interrupted.

No bug report in the analysis data around the events above. I see one JetsamEvent “bug type” “298” crash report, around the time I stopped the app at te end of the hike. Probably the same as the crash report I sent to Korina by mail. Note I was still in airplane mode when I stopped and saved the walk.

Another observation: The app refuses to show the waypath ahead i.s.o. North, while another app I tried during our lunch break in the woods at the pond, had no problems doing so.

Volger wacht op beweging = Dutch for “Tracker waiting for movement”

After setting the app to English, it happened many times again, here is one of them. Note that the brief deviation from the path near the pond was due to me taking a look at the settings.

Note however, that once outside the woods, at first sight there were no glitches, but I have to say I kept the XR in my pocket. I would like to test this in open field more thoroughly. Don’t know if we go in lockdown tomorrow the way France does. Otherwise, maybe a next WindyMaps adventure.

@harryc @Korina
A glitchrich tracking day. XR in airplane mode. WindyMaps running in foreground.

The walk today delivered a tracking stop after making a 90° turn (again). I have to mention we turned from walking along the edge of a forest (South to North) into the forest (East to West). See picture 1. After a while tracking went on again, but the glitch is clearly visible.

I handheld the XR for a while and saw the tracker going from tracking mode to non-tracking mode while I was walking and vice versa, several times. The app linked the broken pieces together, one by one of course. Note that this walk was within the forest, mainly consisting of deciduous trees, i.e. large beech and oak trees, without leaves, but also pines, so it looks possible that gps glitches are the cause. However, what I don’t understand, is that the blue tracker symbol kept following my pace, also during the time the top of the screen turned reddish (=waiting for movement). After a 20 to 50 meters, the top of the screen turned green again (=tracing movement) and the app nicely linked the blue maker to the where the tracer line was interrupted.

No bug report in the analysis data around the events above. I see one JetsamEvent “bug type” “298” crash report, around the time I stopped the app at te end of the hike. Probably the same as the crash report I sent to Korina by mail. Note I was still in airplane mode when I stopped and saved the walk.

Another observation: The app refuses to show the waypath ahead i.s.o. North, while another app I tried during our lunch break in the woods at the pond, had no problems doing so.

Volger wacht op beweging = Dutch for “Tracker waiting for movement”

After setting the app to English, it happened many times again, here is one of them. Note that the brief deviation from the path near the pond was due to me taking a look at the settings.

Note however, that once outside the woods, at first sight there were no glitches, but I have to say I kept the XR in my pocket. I would like to test this in open field more thoroughly. Don’t know if we go in lockdown tomorrow the way France does. Otherwise, maybe a next WindyMaps adventure.

@harryc
Please take a look in Analysis data, scroll to the bottom of Privacy, then select Analysis data, scroll again until you see WindyMaps, and see if you also find limits exceeded as I did, in the memory dump. I took a screenshot as you can see in previous message, so I didn’t send the whole dump.

I found a bug report and sent it via mail to Korina, here are the first lines.

So look for JetsamEvent too.

@Korina
Found two dumps! Maybe this helps, see limits exceeded:

@harryc (and @Korina)
Likewise (XR). Full battery, location always on. Tracking went on without a problem, until the last km, in a 90° turn, WindyMaps seems to have lost control. Straight line across the fields to where I live. And indeed it happens after stowing the XR away in my pocket for some time.

Frustrating indeed. Again I’ve disabled Mobile and WiFi (not using Airplane mode). The walk back home was never closer to houses than say a hundred meter... except in mentioned turn (a coincidence?). I suspect on iPhone WindyMaps gets an unexpected trigger not happening on Samsung. Even if you put the XR WiFi in off mode, as soon as it detects a WiFi that is strong enough it tries to reconnect. Could that be the trigger?

It could be an IOS bug. But as it also happened on my 6, which was running iOS 12, and now on the XR running the latest iOS, I suspect it is WindyMaps acting faulty based on an external trigger. Next time I’ll try airplane mode, see what happens than.

Unfortunately there is no analytics data available in the Privacy setting (at the bottom: Analysis data) when the app does not crash, otherwise a memory dump might help the team to find out what happens.

I had to reload WindyMaps, when I got home (as said = end of walk), so it appears to have been forced into background!

@Korina
Yes, even with the brand new XR it happens now and then that I have to reload. It depends how long I keep te XR in my pocket. If I look regularly, WindyMaps appears to stay on the foreground, but when I don’t look for half an hour or so (a guess, I didn’t time it), it looks like WindyMaps is in the background, and I have to reload it.

I payed attention to the following things:

• I set location to always, since “location when in use” sometimes causes some apps to go in error (I’m not saying WindyMaps is one of them, I did not test that with the XR).

• I swept away every other app, so that only WindyMaps was visible.

• I disconnected from the mobile network, WiFi and Bluetooth.

• I made sure WindyMaps is always on the foreground

• when I don’t move, WindyMaps does not count the time (as set by me)

XR keeps going on tracking without any problem. But note I walked in open areas, so gps failure is excluded.

PS. Walking in a canyon or dense forests may cause gps failure as I experienced with my Garmin Colorado long time ago (Verdon canyon, and mountains with a very dense forest).

BTW, I’ve reset my old 6 to empty, and put it out of sight 😩😊

I got the same issue when testing an old iPhone 6 (88% health) by simulating there is no mobile network. I observed the error repeated each time when the battery level reached about 70% to 72%.

At that point the battery delivers 88% x 70% = 61.6% of its power. To put that in perspective, compared to a new battery delivering 1700mAh (rounded), this old iPhone 6 delivers only 61.6% x 1700mAh = 1047mAh. I found that info on the net (a magazine showed pictures of the battery doctor app). So it is what it is, I presume here that this info is correct.

When I used a power bank to keep the battery level high, the issue did not occur!

If above reasoning is correct, I presume the energy house holding of the iPhone 6 is not sufficient to support the GPS, when it drops below about 1000mAh.

That said, in an earlier message here, it was pointed out that if the battery indicator is in low energy mode (battery indicator turns rom white to yellow), it doesn’t deliver enough power as well.

Now, my brand new iPhone XR (same as yours I guess) does not show drop outs so far during 2.5 hours walks with mobile OFF.

I learned from the web that the energy house holding in the recent iPhones is much better than for example my old 6, so I’m surprised you have it on your R (check the battery health level).

However, what I observed is that WindyMaps, although I kept it on the foreground when I put the XR to sleep, has to reload when I put the XR in my pocket for a while. After a few seconds it’s back on after awakening the phone. I don’t know if that behaviour is normal, as I only tested WindyMaps. Maybe other apps show the same behaviour when not connected to a mobile network.

@Korina
Hi Korina,
I found out I used the insertion in a different way than what you did. After tapping + you get the marker sentence “select a location in the map”. I follow that saying literally, without tapping that sentence first, so I don’t get a red marker on the screen. If I do it the way WindyMaps expect me to do, it works perfectly. So now you probably can replicate what I did “wrong”.

Having said that, I find tapping the marker sentence a superfluous and therefore inefficient action. Why would you need it if the app can find out that by itself easily, it knows you want an insertion, so why a tap ‘n hold not enough?

By the way, I have/had some other route planners (among Garmin), but I’m switching to WindyMaps. I just would like to see the app becoming more efficient in some aspects (see my suggestions, in which the waypoint insertion does not make part yet), so that it becomes at least equal to or better than other route planner tools.

I would be really surprised, having seen the wonderful Windy app, that the Windy team wouldn’t be thinking of making it as efficient as possible... ;o). I’m switching to Windy because one can feel the tremendous drive behind it.

When I try to insert a waypoint via the route planning list (whee you can tap the green +), for example the addition of a new waypoint between waypoint 2 and 3, I get a new End waypoint (on iPad). The route gets messed up.

Yesterday, I was planning one hiking route after the other. At that point some small nuisances become gradually more accentuated and feel like inefficiencies.

1. First waypoint = user choice instead of the default = your location

When planning hikes or bike or road trips, WindyMaps assumes the current location is the starting position. When planning routes this is often not the case. Then the current location becomes a (small) nuisance. Certainly when you’re planning routes far away from your current location. You get a superfluous zoom out and zoom in.

May consider putting the option per type of transport (car, bike, feet).
In short:

route start option, start new route from:

• my location
• first waypoint setting

2. Less taps to define a route:
   The GoTo feels like a superfluous action when you don’t make use of predefined waypoints. Why not assume that each tap ‘n hold is a new waypoint? Now you need one tap ‘n hold + GoTo tap. It’s a larger nuisance then the one mentioned above. When afterwards you consider a waypoint to be wrong, you can always delete it.

The nearest hospital also includes hospitals with a special purpose. They won’t help, and will send you to a general hospital.