Offline Maps and Routing in Suunto App

sky-runner

And here is an example of much better rendering of the map that is actually very easy to read on the go - this is OsmAnd app. Also note that most of the app icons are semi-transparent and don’t obscure the map details as much.

Egika

@pavel.samokha said in Offline Maps and Routing in Suunto App:

@Tomas5 the reverse case is:

I’m somewhere in mountainous not very populated area and I’m searching where to park before going on a hike.

Quite likely there will be also a parking without any explicit tags. Putting it on highest zoom levels will be inconvenient - hard to find, as I will need to scroll a lot.

I’m not arguing it looking overcrowded in the city, but explaining the tradeoffs here. I will think what else we can do

While this may sound practical in theory, I wonder who is using their watch screen while driving a car towards the trailhead.
I think noone.
While driving I use the car’s built in navigation to find a parking spot. So parking places on watch screen is really not necessary.
Thanks for listening.

snow*

I accidentally exited the SA app and, when I logged in again, lost all the offline SA maps I had downloaded. Is this a known issue? SA v. 6.8.9

sky-runner

@Egika said in Offline Maps and Routing in Suunto App:

While this may sound practical in theory, I wonder who is using their watch screen while driving a car towards the trailhead.
I think noone.

We are talking about offline maps in Suunto App in this thread. Consider the following use case. Let’s say you want to bail out from the hike or trail run and find the shortest path back you your parked car. This might not always be retracing your path back, especially if you are doing a loop route. If the car is parked at a trailhead or a parking lot, seeing these symbols on the map would give an important context to help figure out where the car is.

Alternatively, even a better solution would be to be able to see an activity that is in progress on the map in the app. That would clearly show where the beginning of the activity was.

I’ve actually had a similar experience a few weeks ago. I wanted to use Suunto App to find the shortest path back to the car and start navigation on the watch from the app, and figuring out where I needed to navigate to wasn’t obvious at all.

maszop

@sky-runner It’s hard to call a map readable without contour lines.

sky-runner

@maszop said in Offline Maps and Routing in Suunto App:

It’s hard to call a map readable without contour lines.

I disagree for two reasons.

There is an elevation profile at the bottom. You can interactively try to route along the path and see how the elevation changes, and if you don’t like that, it is easy to undo. Paper maps don’t have this interactivity - that’s why contour lines are more important.
Contour line are sometimes helpful, but they should not dominate the view to the point where they obscure other important details, and that’s what we see in my screenshot. Also that long text that tells me I am at West Tiger Mountain Natural Conservation Area. I already know that. With contour lines, the same usefulness could be achieved by using less contrast thiner lines - the brain would still pick it up just fine. What I want to see primarily is the trail system to make a routing decision. An ideal solution would be to toggle contour lines on/off - that’s what I can do in OsmAnd app, but most of the time I don’t really need contour lines even though I likely do more ascent and descent every week than most people in this forum.

maszop

@sky-runner Such pictures look nice on the forum, but in the real world, where most of the area is without trails and roads, such maps are of little use, and often even useless.

Egika

@sky-runner ups. Sorry.

sky-runner

@maszop Ok, here is another screenshot from the same app with countor lines - the same area as the original screenshot of the Suunto app offline map. Arguably, it is still much clearer and easier to read. The app actually has a whole bunch of map rendering configuration settings - it allows me to choose the density of contour lines, their thickness and when their color.

I don’t day Suunto app has to have the same level of customization, although that would be nice, but at less the rendering of contour lines and labels should be more balanced with the rendering of trails.

maszop

@sky-runner You’re overcomplicating simple things.
Contour lines on online maps are very clear and non-intrusive (they don’t ruin the map’s readability) without any switches or other unnecessary mechanisms.

Tomas5

@Egika this is my point too. I usually start at home or at some accomodation where i spent night. So i always get into car and set car navigation app in phone (google maps, mapy.com, sygic, etc.) for parking lot in destination. When i get there a get out of car and start using watch/suunto app. But at that point i am not interested about parking lots because my car is already parked. But either way if i go for hike or bike trip, i am always interested if there is some place on my path where i can buy some hot tea, or some cold baverage for refreshment. Or something to eat. When doing 15-20km by foot or 50-60km by bike. I don’t want everytime bring all food and drinks by me from home.

Tomas5

@sky-runner for your usecase why you need parking lots in map. If you started tracking from your car, isn’t this not sufficient enough to pin point exact location where your car is in suunto app? I am just curious.

But to clarify, i am definitely not against having parking in maps. It can be obviously usefull for someone. But i would prefer if it can be optionally disabled from map. Especially cities are problem. In mountains it is OK as it is.