What shipped, week by week
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Epona is the Gaulish goddess of horses and riders — the one deity the Roman cavalry adopted wholesale and carried across the empire. Protector of anyone on the move.
It seemed like the right name for the thing in your tank bag.
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.
That is not a rounded number. That is how many mountain-bike trails, routes and trail POIs across Europe are now in the catalogue, extracted from OpenStreetMap, scored, tiled and searchable from the map.
Generated writing has one honest failure mode: it is confidently almost right. The fix is not a better model. It is giving you the pen.
You can test an app for weeks at a desk and learn less than you learn in one afternoon with it mounted on a handlebar. This week was the bill for a real ride.
You get home from four days in the mountains with two hundred photos, a GPX track and no intention of ever writing a trip report. We think that is a shame, so we built the thing that writes it for you.
Two threads this week, and they meet in the same place: the moment you stop looking at a phone and start riding.
A platform that can only be read by its own app is a trap, however nice the app is. This week FastGIS learned to speak the standards, and to let riders see each other move.
Here is the uncomfortable truth about a navigation app for adventure riding: the better the road, the worse the coverage. The places worth going are exactly the places your phone gives up.
So this fortnight we made the phone stop needing us.
A week ago FastGIS was a browser tool for running GRASS modules. This week it learned to plan a motorcycle route — and it turns out those two things want the same foundations.