Route planner, one of the main features of the mobile outdoor navigation Locus Map, has become an indispensable tool of many enthusiasts for hiking tours, treks, road or mountain bike rides. Its main characteristics is simplicity of controlling in complexity of background data and route planning options. Together with the wide map selection Locus Map offers, running on a portable device like tablet or mobile phone, planning routes is quite a different experience. Let's have a look at its most useful features:

Routing on-road, drawing off-road

When you plan a trip running along roads or paths, use automatic route drawing powered by cooperating routing services - BRouter or GraphHopper.

Each service has its pros and cons. BRouter works offline and offers a lot of routing profiles:

On the other hand, it needs storage for offline routing data and the route calculation is quite slow and power consuming.

GraphHopper is very fast because calculating a route runs on a remote server and doesn't engage your mobile processor. And you usually plan routes at home with wifi internet connection, right? But alas, it offers just a few basic routing profiles:

When you plan a backcountry trip where there are either no roads or paths or required map/routing data aren't available, use the manual mode:

Check route elevation and estimated on-route time

During planning, all necessary info is at hand. Just slide the chart up:

The chart changes according to your editing:

Detailed statistics show also the gradient chart for even finer route tuning:

Avoid obstacles

Forrest works ahead and it's dangerous to pass? Put it in map and let Locus find a detour!

Plan a geocaching trip

Nice warm weather expected next Saturday and you are a keen geocacher. Let's go for a trip somewhere you don't know and hunt a dozen local geocaches. Put them in Locus route planner, it'll find a way connecting them all!

Want to go on bikes instead? Recalculate the route!

You've changed your mind. The weather's gonna be awesome, wow, you will manage to hunt even more geocaches! You've just planned a walking route... doesn't matter, just push Recalculate all button and select bike as the activity.

Cool tip at the end - gradient-colored route

Would you like to know clearly where is your route steep or flat? It's quite useful, especially when you ride a bike. And what's more, you can plan the route according to it and avoid too steep up-hills... Just set up gradient coloring of your route planning line:

Locus Map route planner is very intuitive but if you need to know everything about its features, check Locus Manual.

Happy route planning!

Článek Locus Map – plan your routes like a pro se nejdříve objevil na Locus Map - mobile outdoor navigation app.

Despite the summer vacations are only a bit behind its middle, we have been extensively developing and testing. Huge work has been done on the new Route planner and Track editor - both in brand new screens, new UI, with new functionality. However, we are still not absolutely satisfied with them and we must also include results of their public testing in their final appearance so a bit more work must be done on them. So, you have to look forward to them a little longer :). Nevertheless, we decided to publish a new Locus version as we managed to finish many other things:

Map language switch - read the map as locals

Our World is pretty colorful, you know that. And not only in colors but also in languages and alphabets. Latin alphabet is generally known but in many countries a Westerner has problem with reading local names. Fortunately, the OpenStreetMap project enables displaying multi-language names of cities and villages in many countries. For example, Laos. A beautiful country with booming tourism, luring more and more adventurers. Laos alphabet, however, might be quite tricky for many of them. Our LoMaps, rendered from OSM data, can help - you can switch the language of the map in something more understandable.

Map with original names:

The language switch can be found in the map detail screen:

The same map after switching it to English:

Online GraphHopper - fast and data-efficient

We've added a new online routing service to our portfolio - online GraphHopper. Some of you have probably used its offline version in Locus via a GraphHopper add-on which is, to be honest, still in a sort of alpha version. This online version, however, works amazingly fast and consumes only a tiny portion of your mobile data (FUP) - in a range of just tens of kilobytes. Here in Europe where the extra charges for data roaming have been abolished it's pretty nice.

To turn this router on, go to Locus settings > Navigation > Navigation data source and tap GraphHopper:

When you want to start navigation, just choose your target and then means of your transport (a.k.a. navigation profile). GraphHopper offers "car", three kinds of bike - "cycle", "MTB" and "racing" and two types of walk - "walk" and "hike":

Function panels settings in presets

Many of you wished to have the option to set different layouts of function panels for various activities with one or two clicks:

Since launching Locus Presets we've been close to it. Now, finally, we found a way how to implement function panels settings in Presets. If you need to re-set function panels position by one click, you have to switch this option on first:

1. open Presets and check the "advanced mode" in the topbar:

2. Select the Preset you want to adjust and tap "Edit":

3. Go to the Preset settings mode:

4. Check the "Set functions panels" option:

The option to set functions panels appears in the Preset. You can set the panels as you are used to.

Pick the right color!

Locus line color manager has been also significantly improved. Firstly, we reworked the basic color selection so that it contains colors easily distinguishable on map:

You don't have to confirm your color selection as before. Just tap the color and your new line color is set.

The advanced color picker stays as it was because it's just perfect :):

For super-geeks we've added an option to define colors by codes - in HEX, RGB and HSV modes:

Nice, isn't it? And, of course, it's not all but we don't want you to spent your vacation reading the whole list of changes, improvements and fixes the new version offers. And if by any chance you are interested, you can find it on the traditional place - in Locus menu > About application > Release notes.

Článek New Locus Map 3.25 brings a nice bundle of improvements se nejdříve objevil na Locus Map - mobile outdoor navigation app.