EpicRide: the big screen finally earns its keep
Some things belong on a phone. Planning a two-week trip across four countries is not one of them. This week was almost entirely the desktop client, and it went from useful to genuinely good.
A planner that keeps up
The layers panel was rebuilt layers-first, with track cards folding into expandable rows — the previous shape drowned once you had a dozen tracks loaded. Route legs can be dragged to insert vias, so shaping a route is a gesture rather than a form.
Elevation profiles run the full length of the route and hover-pin onto the map as you scrub them: put the cursor on the climb and the map shows you where the climb is. There is a measure tool, compass and rotation, per-layer styling that survives being included in a route, and a basemap catalogue with Standard, Satellite, Hybrid and vector styles.
Riding modes landed too: configure them once on their own page, then assign a mode per leg from a catalogue. The same trip can be motorway to the mountains and gravel once you arrive, without planning it as two separate routes and reconciling them by hand.
A real vector editor, in a browser
QGIS-style editing, and full vertex editing on group tracks — loops, TET trails, imported GPX — which is where most browser editors give up. Live drag preview shows the reroute as you move the point rather than after you drop it.
There is undo/redo at the top of the panel, and sketch persistence, so closing the tab is an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe. Edit mode is an explicit toggle: you cannot nudge a carefully built route by mis-clicking on it.
Every layer, in one place
Curvy roads. TET with multi-country selection. MTB with trail merging along OSM ways — because a single trail is usually a dozen disconnected OSM fragments — plus reach-the-trailhead routing and per-trail stats. Beach seeker. Friluftsliv as full cards with info, map-select, range and free-text filtering.
Select on the map and the matching result card reveals itself; select the card and the map follows. Two-way selection sounds obvious and is the thing that makes a results list usable at 300 items.
The library, round-tripped
Plans save and load in full. Library items show map previews and full-extent card previews. There are landing pages per item, ratings, owner title editing, audience sharing, and Friends and Groups. What you plan on the desktop is what your phone already knows about.
And the awkward limits
Two Valhalla ceilings got fixed rather than worked around. A 50-location cap
surfaced as a cryptic error 150 with no hint that a limit existed; the client
now chunks the request and stitches the result. And the distance limits were
raised to 4000 km, so planning Norway to Portugal does not require splitting the
trip in half and pretending that was your plan.
Where this leaves us
There is a real division of labour now. Plan on the desktop with everything visible at once; ride with the phone, offline, with the plan already there. Each does what its screen is good at, and neither pretends to be the other.
Dig deeper: EpicRide.