Has Caltopo UI development stagnated?
We all know Caltopo maps and layers are the knees bees, second to none... But the whole interface seems stuck in the 80s, particularly on the mobile app
- Very glove unfriendly - tiny little buttons and data entry fields spaced closely together, OK for a mouse but not for fat fingers.
- Funky useless "recreation" icons - three things related to dogs, ATM icon, life preserver?
- Inconsistent handling of trace widths between mobile and desktop - try a dashed line, 3 on mobile is barely visible but is very fat on desktop
- Ditto for marker sizing but with the inverse problem - things that look good on desktop are too large on mobile
- Simple things going unaddressed for years - like the puny barely visible hair cross that marks the middle of the displayed map
- Very clunky to do mass operations on subsets of markers and traces, specifically move them between map sets, etc
- No ability to display markers ordered by distance from the current center of the map (or current GPS position)
- Limited ability to reduce clutter around inhabited areas - even at fairly low zooms every little street is visible
I could probably rattle off a dozen other nags but the above is more than enough to illustrate my point. Numerous other apps are coming for Caltopo's lunch, the best financed ones probably being OnX and Fatmaps. Map quality remains a competitive advantage for Caltopo for now, but how much longer is it going to be for this to remain the case? Without serious re-imagining of the UI I see trouble down the road. Admittedly addressing the issues above probably require re-write from scratch.
Thoughts? Am I missing something?
Comments
2 comments
I use caltopo on the desktop. I don't know where development efforts are going, and it seems like the forum here doesn't exactly dance with participation. But a couple years back I remarked on the crosshairs needing to have a color option or something to make them more visible. I did receive some response – but still no improvement in crosshairs. After checking out OnX on my motorcycle pal's phone I immediately thought that CalTopo had some strong fresh competition.
On the desktop at least It seems like there are a number of things that require more steps in [my] typical use that could easily be fixed by a few more user settings (prefs) including a crosshairs color or crosshairs line width, default layers, which forest service map color to use when that layer is selected etc.
Right now though my big nag is that if something that was working fine but then gets broken it seems to take a long time to get fixed. This time it's Simulated View's MAP THIS SPOT. I figured when it broke that it wouldn't be long for the problem to be addressed. But here I am, commenting on something that you'd think a developer would immediately be aware of and FIX...
Hi Dave,
We would love if you can email us at help@caltopo.com if you notice a bug. We don't always see when something isn't working as expected. We saw your other post today and are now working on getting it fixed.
Please sign in to leave a comment.