EpicRide, the desktop planner
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The desktop planner now has an attribute table, the way a desktop GIS has one. A layer's features are the rows and their attributes are the columns, and the table and the map follow each other: select a row and its feature lights up on the map, click a feature on the map and its row lights up in the table.
The desktop planner's Layers on the map widget is now the one list of everything the map can show. It has every layer the rider app has, under the same names and in the same order, each with its legend. Your own layers can be styled the way a desktop GIS styles them, and the order of the list is the order the map draws them in. Your drawings and measurements are layers too.
The desktop planner's map tools now work the way a desktop GIS does. Identify tells you what every layer has at a point, Measure keeps each measurement in a widget of its own, and the vector editor has every action on its toolbar, each with a key. Only one of them is on at a time.
The desktop planner now tells you what a route holds before you ride it. A briefing under the route planner sums it up badge by badge, the stop list gives every leg its own figures, and the elevation profile and the map point at the same place from either side.
Dirt-first routing sends you down forest roads, and forest roads have gates. Most you open and close behind you. Some are padlocked, and the only thing worse than a locked gate 40 km in is one nobody told you about. Routes now carry their gates: drawn on the track, avoided when they are shut, and called out on the way.
EpicRide has always opened on a map. You arrived, a route planner loaded, and whatever you actually came for was somewhere behind it. From today the desktop client opens on a Dashboard of what you are riding, and the planner is a place you go.
Behind that change is a new object: an event. A time, a roster, and the library records you ride.
EpicRide's Library used to be two tabs and a scroll: everything you had saved, fetched in one go and filtered in the browser. Today it becomes a primitive — one component that is the Library page, the picker inside the planner and the roadbook editor, and the save form everywhere something can be saved. And rally roadbooks move into it: a saved book is now a library record like a route or a ride, so it can be shared, exported, searched and linked to the track it came from.
For a month the roadbook program has been building its foundations: a data model that carries the official FIM/FIA structure, an exporter that real rally readers accept, a symbol library drawn glyph by glyph, a print module measured off the FIA's own Diagram 1. Today the last and largest piece ships: a full roadbook editor in EpicRide, and with it the whole pipeline — from any GPX to a printed, regulation-shaped book — is live.
We route motorcycles through the Alps. This week we discovered that, as far as the software was concerned, the Alps were not there.
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.