The datasets behind the maps
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Two days ago the rain overlay was a still picture from someone else's tile server. Today the Map tab carries a weather timeline of our own — radar, nowcast and forecast; rain, wind gusts, temperature and visibility; snow, thunder and wind direction on top — pan-European, with 1 km detail in the Nordics, and the same numbers printed under every stop of a planned route. This post is the whole of it in one place.
Two more answers on the weather timeline, closing the hazards set that started this morning with snow and thunder: the gust layer now says from where it blows, and a fourth layer says how far you can see.
The weather timeline could tell you how much rain, how hard the wind and how cold. It could not tell you the two things that actually decide a mountain day: whether the 3 mm/h at 2 °C on the pass falls as rain or snow, and whether there is thunder in the hours ahead. From today it does both, on the same rain frames, with nothing new to switch on.
This morning the map got a rain timeline. This evening the same bar carries two more things a rider wants to know before a day out: wind gusts and temperature, hour by hour for the day ahead, from the same open model that already gives the rain forecast.
The rain overlay used to be one still picture: the latest radar frame from a third-party tile service, shown on the Navigate tab and nowhere else. From today it is a timeline — the last two hours of weather radar as frames you can play, pause and drag through, on the Map tab beside the lean and acceleration HUD, and on Navigate. The frames come from a service of our own, built on the pan-European EUMETNET OPERA radar composite.
The curvy-roads finder has run on a database we downloaded from someone else's site since the beginning. From today it runs on roads we score ourselves, from OpenStreetMap, for every country in the catalogue — with Germany, France and the Balkans in for the first time, every road result listed once instead of twice, and the scenic, water and elevation filters finally backed by data.
This morning's post said any track can now be ridden either way with legal turn-by-turn, built when you import it. For the Trans Euro Trail we went one step further: the server now builds every one of its 331 sub-trails, both directions, in all ten navigation languages, before anyone asks. Opening a TET trail no longer builds anything on the phone, and a country offline pack now carries its trails, so you can import and ride them in airplane mode.
Losing the OSM volunteer tile servers stung. It also settled an argument we had been having with ourselves: a routing platform that cannot render its own map is renting its most visible surface from someone else, on someone else's schedule.
This week we stopped renting.
No new screens this week. Instead: the data underneath every screen got fresh, and stays fresh, and now tells us when it isn't.
That is not a rounded number. That is how many mountain-bike trails, routes and trail POIs across Europe are now in the catalogue, extracted from OpenStreetMap, scored, tiled and searchable from the map.