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Massimo Di Stefano
FastGIS author
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Talking to the bike

· 4 min read
Massimo Di Stefano
FastGIS author

This was the week the app stopped inferring what the motorcycle was doing and started asking it. A Bluetooth OBD-II adapter, two garage sessions, one surprise hiding in monitor mode — and by the end, live engine data on the phone and a gear indicator nobody sold us.

The roadbook rides itself

· 3 min read
Massimo Di Stefano
FastGIS author

Since July the rider app has been able to turn any track into a rally-style tulip roadbook — the Rally side of the Road ⇄ Rally toggle reads the corners straight off the GPX shape, no road network required. It was a document: something to scroll with a thumb at a fuel stop. Today it becomes a navigation mode.

How far to the next stop?

· 2 min read
Massimo Di Stefano
FastGIS author

Plan a route with a lunch stop and a mountain pass in the middle, start navigating, and until today the app would tell you exactly one thing about time: when you'd reach the end. The intermediate stops — the whole reason the route has that shape — were invisible from the saddle.

Your captures, and where they live

· 3 min read
Massimo Di Stefano
FastGIS author

Field captures — the photos, videos, audio notes and waypoints you record on a ride — have always had two homes: the phone that took them and the server they sync to. Since June, the Library has been smart enough to stream a capture from the server when its local copy is gone, so deleting data to free space no longer dead-ends a session. But you still couldn't say what you actually meant: "keep this, just not on my phone", or "I don't want to see this in my library any more — but don't destroy it".

Today the session view grows three storage actions that say exactly that.

The week we drew our own map

· 5 min read
Massimo Di Stefano
FastGIS author

Losing the OSM volunteer tile servers stung. It also settled an argument we had been having with ourselves: a routing platform that cannot render its own map is renting its most visible surface from someone else, on someone else's schedule.

This week we stopped renting.

Roll camera

· 3 min read
Massimo Di Stefano
FastGIS author

Riders already carry an action camera. Until now it was a separate device with its own app, its own battery anxiety and its own timeline that never quite lined up with the ride.

Not any more.