Epona — the app on the bike
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The weather timeline could tell you how much rain, how hard the wind and how cold. It could not tell you the two things that actually decide a mountain day: whether the 3 mm/h at 2 °C on the pass falls as rain or snow, and whether there is thunder in the hours ahead. From today it does both, on the same rain frames, with nothing new to switch on.
This morning the map got a rain timeline. This evening the same bar carries two more things a rider wants to know before a day out: wind gusts and temperature, hour by hour for the day ahead, from the same open model that already gives the rain forecast.
The rain overlay used to be one still picture: the latest radar frame from a third-party tile service, shown on the Navigate tab and nowhere else. From today it is a timeline — the last two hours of weather radar as frames you can play, pause and drag through, on the Map tab beside the lean and acceleration HUD, and on Navigate. The frames come from a service of our own, built on the pan-European EUMETNET OPERA radar composite.
The curvy-roads finder has run on a database we downloaded from someone else's site since the beginning. From today it runs on roads we score ourselves, from OpenStreetMap, for every country in the catalogue — with Germany, France and the Balkans in for the first time, every road result listed once instead of twice, and the scenic, water and elevation filters finally backed by data.
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.
Open TET sub-trail I-01 in Sardinia the other way round and the app used to say 14 hours 18 minutes for 169 km. Nobody rides it that slowly. Today the same trail plans at about 6 hours 40 minutes. While you ride, the estimate now learns how fast you actually go, and it remembers that for next time.
This morning's post said any track can now be ridden either way with legal turn-by-turn, built when you import it. For the Trans Euro Trail we went one step further: the server now builds every one of its 331 sub-trails, both directions, in all ten navigation languages, before anyone asks. Opening a TET trail no longer builds anything on the phone, and a country offline pack now carries its trails, so you can import and ride them in airplane mode.
Follow a GPX in the direction it was recorded and the turn-by-turn is good. Follow it the other way and, until today, the line sent you round every roundabout on the empty side of the road. A recorded track is a path, not a route: reversed, it runs against one-way streets, divided carriageways and roundabouts. As of today every imported GPX, TET sub-trail and Library line rides in either direction on a legal route with full turn-by-turn.
Plug the phone into CarPlay or Android Auto and the car screen used to show a map of its own. The route was a thick white line. The basemap ignored your language, POI choices and night mode. The turn arrows on Apple's card were not quite the ones on the phone. As of today the car draws the same map as the phone, and the vehicle marker behaves the way Google Maps taught everyone to expect.
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.