Track up vs north up Completed
While navigating, especially in a UTV on SAR missions, it would be very helpful to have the option to switch from the default "North Up" view to a "Track Up" by clicking on the compass/reticle icon in the bottom right of the app.
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12 comments
Wanted to share with everyone that the "Heading Up" feature has been implemented: https://blog.caltopo.com/2024/05/22/new-feature-heading-up/
Thanks for all the feedback!
Agreed!
One of the most helpful electronic map features when navigating is to switch into a "navigation" mode. Holding your phone flat and point it like a compass to where you want to go rotates the map accordingly. Super helpful at confusing turn points or multiple intersects. This really is one of the only things missing to make the mobile app be my go-to stand alone trail mapping program.
Any thoughts on working on this feature? It would be a great additional feature for the app.
Bumping this. Track up would be very useful.
Yes. PLEASE add this feature.
Hello everyone, you'll be happy to hear that we're currently working on building out this feature! We'd love to gather some more information from everyone about this feature request.
At a high level we'd like to know:
1. What is your intended use case for this feature? Tell us about when you'll use this and how you see it helping you.
2. What are your expectations for what this feature should do and how it should work? bcoray mentions clicking the compass icon at the bottom right to toggle between modes. Is this what everyone is expecting, or did some people have a different UI in mind?
3. Many other mapping apps also allow you to rotate the map freely by placing two fingers on the screen of your device and pivoting them. Despite this being fairly common functionality, I don't see any explicit mentions of it in this thread. Is this functionality not as desirable as 'track up'?
Feel free to either respond here, or reach out to us at help@caltopo.com.
We appreciate your enthusiasm for improving CalTopo!
mikeofferman, Jeff Fullmer, Matthew King, Tracy Trimble
Thanks Zach. My biggest use case for this feature is when I am at a trail fork and trying to determine which way to go. I use it for trail running so I don't have much time to study my phone. I need to pull it out on the fly and quickly look to see which direction to go. The toggle with the lower right icon would be perfect. The way I see it is I need the phone and map to align with the direction I am holding the phone. I have wrapped my brain around the current mode of the map always north but it's a challenge sometimes. I have to move my phone around a bit to verify the correct turn and think 3 dimensionally. That works fine at the beginning of a long day but during a race or after a long day it's much more difficult to process sometimes. I feel like I am pretty good with tech and maps so I can manage it but others I know have given up on Caltopo because it's just too difficult for them to navigate with on mobile.
Thank you for the followup.
I wouldn't mind seeing this toggle in the "Display Options" section. I don't see myself changing the setting that often, I would be keeping it in the new direction of travel mode all of the time.
I would be using this when driving to a trailhead and using CalTopo to navigate roads and also while hiking. It is not intuitive to me to look at a map north orientation and figure out which way to turn while navigating.
I don't really need the two-finger rotation, I can rotate myself or the phone if needed. Plus if you did rotate the display, how would you get it back to direction of travel mode/map north orientation?
As a side note, as Jeff mentions, if I am not actively recording a track and using the map to help get to a destination, I do find that the location icon times out way too quickly. It seems like this could be extended to many minutes instead of ~15 seconds, or be a setting.
Very much looking forward to this enhancement!
mikeofferman Jeff Fullmer
Thanks so much for your responses!
This additional context is super helpful for us as we try to gain a complete understanding of how this feature would be used.
In regards to the location icon - we hear your concerns. We're doing some investigation into that feature as part of this effort, but I can't make any promises that changes are coming to that feature in the near term. Revising that feature deserves a lot of careful consideration, as it's a pretty core part of the user experience and we'd hate to get it wrong.
For now, I think a decent solution is to use 'Keep Centered'. Tap the 'four dot' menu in the bottom right corner of the screen in the mobile app and then tap 'Keep Centered'. This well continually recenter the map on your location until you manually turn it off. It's worth noting that you can still pan around on the map when 'Keep Centered' is turned on, but after 30 seconds of inactivity the map will re-center again. This feature can increase battery usage, since it uses your phones GPS continually. Hopefully this helps.
Thanks again for the quick responses,
Zach
I would love either 2-finger rotate OR a track up/North up quick toggle button like you see in Google maps.
My use case is the same as Jeffs -- you come to a fork in the trail and in order to orient yourself, you have to turn the phone around to get the track to face up to orient yourself. I do this at every fork when backcountry Skiing to make sure I am following my route.
By the end of the trip I have spun my phone around so many times it's like I'm making a Pizza....
Direction of travel would be a great addition.
My easy use case, I was trying to get to a search in Mendo, over 20 miles of dirt roads following a caltopo track. Trying to follow it with oriented north up was a challenge having it be the direction of travel would make it much easier to follow.
Same is true with navigating to search assignments, unless they happen to be north of you, it would make it easier to navigate to and within with a direction of travel option.
With the latest update, that option was introduced.
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