It reminds me of a very simplified interface of CalTopo.
One question, are you open to PR's? If so, I'd love to see slope angle added into this in the same format for avalanche awareness along a trial.
Great work!
A really fantastic team building some absolutely gorgeous topographic basemaps from publicly available data. Hopefully they'll find time to add a slope angle overlay at some point.
I'm actually using a plugin[1] that handles elevation and slope graphing. Adding slope to the graph is as simple as adding a line in the configuration.
I only intend this to be a boilerplate for others to start their own projects. I'm not sure how much active development I'll do on it, but I'm certainly open to PRs that make it better.
I'd be curious to know how this directly impacted Gaia development. It's a tool I rely on essentially every day in some pretty harsh environments so I second this concern.
No one is gate-keeping these taxpayer-funded resources, which is sortof what you're implying here. It costs money to process, host, and deliver these taxpayer -funded maps to people, especially offline.
If you're a legacy user of Gaia, I'd encourage you to give the app another shot. Originally Gaia was the best way to view USGS quads on your phone. Since then, we've invested a ton of resources and engineering into building a vector topographic map based in OpenStreetMap, which I think is a huge value add for backcountry users.
We give that away for free.
But if all you're looking for is USGS topos, I'd use Avenza.
The subscription model has distorted the smartphone map app ecosystem, just like it has the rest of the software industry.
For the record, OSM maps lack the detail and reliability of the legacy USGS 7.5 minute topographic quads. For that matter, the most recent USGS topographic maps are themselves almost as bad as OSM! For best coverage I would recommend the 1990s series or earlier. ( https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-do-us-topo-maps-differ-histori... )
For Android, OSMAnd is good enough for navigation and Qfield can load any GIS vector or raster layer from a desktop QGIS project.
w.r.t the acquisition, we've seen some fairly dramatic highs and lows. The 20% layoff earlier this year was definitely the lowest low, but the whole org was affected, not just Gaia. On the flip side, we've been working really hard on developing a roadmap that centers on stabilising and enhancing the bedrock features that our users have come to expect, and that are sometimes less than perfect. This is something that Outside PM's have been really pushing on. I'm enthusiastic about that focus, because it's been sorely needed.
The tl;dr is that the forces that have caused some of the user experience challenges of late were in play long before the Outside acqusition, and if anything Outside is providing the resources necessary for us to commit to fixing them.
One question if you're able to comment - what's up with the satellite snow coverage layers? I tried to use those to scout for a hike in October, but both most recent and cloudless were from 2021.
I assume you're talking about our "fresh sat" layers -- in some places the recency of the imagery in those layers is unfortunately dependent on some rather stochastic factors. These factors are usually (but not always) correlated to location on the earth.
We get the latest imagery taken from the satellites (Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8/9) nearly as soon as it's acquired, and then apply some quality filters to it which either accept the imagery for processing or reject it. It's entirely possible to get repeatedly unlucky in that regard, where for a given location no imagery that passes our quality filters has been taken for a long time.
This especially happens a lot near the poles, or in very cloudy places.
are you willing to share where you were looking that you experienced this issue?
Thanks for sharing the filtering process, that makes more sense how a long gap can occur.
I make sure to go on airplane mode and hard-reload the app, and it generally works great. If I have week signal, or don’t reload it, or anything like that, it gets confused and constantly freezes.
The offline route creation is very iffy though.