The map grows a bike
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.
Routing arrives
Valhalla is now wired in properly: real turn-by-turn directions, isochrones, time/distance matrices, and — the one we were most excited about — a loop generator. Give it a start point and a distance, and it samples waypoints by angle, tunes how far it reaches, and hands back a ride that comes home.
Most routers can get you from A to B. Getting you from A back to A is a genuinely harder problem, and a much more useful one for anyone riding for the pleasure of it rather than to arrive. A naive implementation picks three random points and gives you a triangle with a motorway down one side. Sampling by angle from the start, then tuning how far out each arm reaches, is what turns that into something you would actually ride. It also persists its state, so tweaking a distance does not throw away the shape you liked.
A phone, not just a browser
The mobile foundation landed alongside it: GPS integration, POI clustering, and the first round of usability work that only shows up when you actually hold the thing at a junction. Clustering sounds like a detail until you zoom out over a country and the map tries to draw forty thousand individual pins.
And the desktop tools kept moving
The vector editor grew up considerably — digitise, select, move, vertex-edit, write attributes. The DB Manager arrived, so you can inspect the SQLite or PostgreSQL table behind a layer without leaving the browser.
There's a measure tool that does proper geodetic length and area rather than pretending the world is flat — over a few hundred kilometres at Nordic latitudes the difference is not academic. And the GRASS → mago-3d-terrainer → CesiumJS pipeline turns a raster DEM into quantized-mesh terrain you can actually fly over, which is a much better way to understand a mountain pass than a contour map.
Where this is going
The interesting thing about building a rider app on top of a spatial analysis platform is that the analysis does not go away — it becomes the thing that makes the routes good. Every algorithm already in GRASS is, potentially, a way of deciding which road is worth riding.
We are just getting started on that.
Dig deeper: the routing tool and the terrain builder both have guides now.