After two months of intensive work, we bring you again the new version of your favorite outdoor navigation – Locus Map 4.24. In addition to a number of minor fixes and improvements, we of course have a few highlights for you. So let’s briefly introduce them:

LoPoints – the most interesting places on the map

As you know, LoPoints are places on the map marked with icons. They are available online and offline and can be displayed on top of any map. LoPoints are clickable – if you click on them, you’ll see lots of tourist information about the place, often including a description or photos from Wikipedia. Alternatively, there are photos from users who have visited the location and documented its current appearance. You can view the photos both in the app and on the web, including the user gallery. We continue to deepen this user interactivity with map data, as you can see in the following news:

Ratings and comments

You can now add a review to each LoPoint, consisting of a rating and a few words about what you liked or disliked about the place. The rating is similar to Google Play, that is, the highest praise is for 5 stars, the lowest for one star. You can comment on your rating, add recommendations, tips or warnings for others. Of course, all within the framework of civilized and polite attitude.

1 photo for LoPoint = 1 LoCoin to your account

Do you know what LoCoins are? Yes, that’s right, our “virtual currency” with which you can buy maps in the Locus Store, and also purchase Premium features. Until now, LoCoins could only be obtained for money either directly in the Locus Store or on our website. Now, you can also earn them for photos of places you’ve visited.

The ability to add your own photos to LoPoints to document their current status for other members of the community of hikers and outdoor enthusiasts has been around since last year. From now on, we want to give back at least a little bit for your contributing to a good cause: 

For every approved photo you attach to LoPoint, we’ll credit your Locus account with 1 LoCoin.

So for 30 photos of interesting paces you can get a LoMap of Croatia, for 225 photos you can get half of Germany, for 869 photos you can get Premium Silver for a year, and if you are creative enough, for 2099 photos you can get Premium Gold for a year! And that’s worth it :).

Track recording just got a little bit better

Another topic for modification has become recording the tracks of your trips and training sessions, which we haven’t touched on in a while. We’ve looked into it a bit more and made two major improvements based on your recommendations:

Lower battery consumption

We’ve optimized the recording process, cleaned up elements that were putting unnecessary strain on performance, and the result is significantly lower battery power consumption – you can save tens of percent if you use it all day. Even with the display on.

Attention, you are in motion, and you have a paused recording!

Many of you have expressed the wish that it would be good to have a notification in Locus|Map to alert you in the following situations:

• track recording is running, but you have interrupted the activity
• track recording is interrupted but you are moving

And because we’re equipping the app according to your wishes, we’ve added the notifications. You can turn them on or off as needed in the settings of each track recording profile.

Share tracks with photos

Locus Map is bursting with ways to share your track with friends. With a link to the web, export to GPX, KMZ and other formats like HD JPEG with map and detailed stats… The only thing we were missing was a nice “Instagram” picture to share on your social networks.

So we added it, in three versions. You can share the track with the map in the background:

With an image based on the activity on the track:

Or with your own picture, taken during the ride:

Plus, something for geocachers and route planners

Log labs offline

Passionate geocaching players, specializing in lab caches, will also find something for themselves. We’ve taken Locus’ capabilities up a notch again and added the ability for them to log their catches offline, i.e. without the need to be connected to the internet. 

And to save data, you can also set a maximum number of log downloads per cache.

More accurate time estimation on the route

Estimating time on the route is a pretty important factor for many people when planning hiking tours or cycling training trips. So far, time estimation has been very approximate based on general criteria and parameters. Now we introduce the possibility to adjust some factors according to one’s own abilities, which makes the time estimation much more precise.

For the “walking” and “hiking” routing profiles, we have added the ability to adjust the default speed on the flat. This becomes the basis for calculating the time estimate, which incorporates other internal parameters such as elevation, gradient angle, and surface type. These are already taken by the application from routing and elevation data. The default speed can be set between 2 – 12 km/h, so even recreational runners can use it.

Road cyclists, on the other hand, measure their abilities mainly by power in watts, which they monitor with wattmeters on their bikes or trainers. When the personal power value is defined as the basis for calculating the time estimate on the route, we immediately get much more accurate results. There is a range from 60 to 240 W of average rider power:

Finally, something for geeks

It wouldn’t be Locus Map if we didn’t have something in reserve for the enjoyment of tech-savvy users. As you know, Locus Map can work with the BRouter offline router. This can be set up as an alternative to our LoRouter if you want to use your own routing profiles. We have now made it possible to set all supported parameters of these custom profiles in Locus Map. But how to work with them and how to get them into Locus is for another blog post, so another time.

Enjoy the summer!

Header photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash