Routegadget 2.0: Sneak preview

[frostbite]

If/when everybody moves over to Routegadget 2.0, will we lose access to all the historical stuff held on the original Routegadget? My club has over 60 events on there going back 6 years.

[usuallylast]

I think it's great that you are working on this new version - obviously a few tweaks still needed and you will never please everyone, but thanks anyway.
I'm a smartphone addict, but like EddieH I don't think peering at the maps or inputting routes etc on one would be my priority.
I also wondered what the policy would be re previous events on RG - can it remain as an archive or will the java problem prevent it working eventually?

[Simon E]

If/when everybody moves over to Routegadget 2.0, will we lose access to all the historical stuff held on the original Routegadget? My club has over 60 events on there going back 6 years.

Everything you see on the HH website is old data from the 130+ events in our existing Routegadget installation. I have made no changes to it at all. Routegadget 2.0 simply reads the existing data files and creates a new way of looking at it. So you won't lose anything.

[Simon E]

Congratulations - Looks great - a lot better than the original RG (that was always a bit slow and stuttery.
I'll push my club to get a licence as soon as you are ready to offer it!

The current intention is to offer it as open source so it will be free. If you talk nicely to Paul Frost he can probably set up MAROC as one of the early test sites. He's already done BASOC as part of his testing.

<geekalert> If you run a Routegadget site and feel confident about using ftp then you can now install Routegadget 2.0 on your own site to test it. Details are at the bottom of the page here.</geekalert>

[Angry Haggis]

Routes and courses on Routegadget are stored as simple text files, not involving Java, so I presume that (a) there will be no problem in showing historical runs and courses in RG2, and that (b) this is indeed how the Simon and Paul have approached the work. Although the data is transferred to the browser in a more modern format than simple text files, the format relative coordinates looks identical to those used in the old Routegadget.

Example (in old RG):
http://www.slow.routegadget.co.uk/karta ... nat_51.txt

Great work!

[Angry Haggis]

Congratulations - Looks great - a lot better than the original RG (that was always a bit slow and stuttery.
I'll push my club to get a licence as soon as you are ready to offer it!

The current intention is to offer it as open source so it will be free. If you talk nicely to Paul Frost he can probably set up MAROC as one of the early test sites. He's already done BASOC as part of his testing.

<geekalert> If you run a Routegadget site and feel confident about using ftp then you can now install Routegadget 2.0 on your own site to test it. Details are at the bottom of the page here.</geekalert>

Simon, that's brilliant, thanks.

Two minute installation, and I have all the SLOW runs here:

http://www.slow.routegadget.co.uk/rg2/

Simulating all 187 recorded runs from this year's London City Race simultaneously is proving to be a bit ambitious for my computer!

[Simon]

This is looking really good.

An improvement for those of us with small screens, which would also help those on tablet/mobile devices, would be the ability to hide/minimise the Events(/Course/etc.) box and the replay function box.

[frostbite]

If/when everybody moves over to Routegadget 2.0, will we lose access to all the historical stuff held on the original Routegadget? My club has over 60 events on there going back 6 years.

Everything you see on the HH website is old data from the 130+ events in our existing Routegadget installation. I have made no changes to it at all. Routegadget 2.0 simply reads the existing data files and creates a new way of looking at it. So you won't lose anything.

Aha - thanks Simon. I posted my question without actually being able to see the new Routegadget because I was at work and the browser wasn't up to it. Now it all makes sense - and it is looking really good.

[andypat]

I found the same problem with intuitiveness that eddie had. Couldnt find the right way to start the race!

[Paul Frost]

I'm sure we are all grateful to Simon for taking on the task of updating RouteGadget, so lets not give him too hard a time, remember this is still the early stages of development.

The touch interface that is required for tablets and phones is a significant step and will be a challenge to implement. Just think about how you add routes now and then think about how you would do that with your large fat finger instead of the single pixel accuracy of a mouse pointer with buttons to click. The tap action of touch is very clumsy for such detail.

The issues of it not working with some older browsers is an acceptable loss as far as I'm concerned. The current RG tends to work fine with old machines that haven't been updated. I'm more concerned with ensuring RG works in the future. As people have pointed out, the future is devices that aren't computers/PC's.

Tablets are being used more and more as replacement's for computers. When I recently went to South Africa for nearly 4 weeks I only took my iPad and managed to do everything I needed to do (including setting up a new RG instal for South African clubs to use). I bought a local SIM and swopped it between my iPhone and iPad, but the SIM card carrier restrictions didn't allow me to use either to create a hotspot. So if I had taken my laptop I would only have been able to use it on WiFi. As it was I had almost 100% 3G coverage wherever we went and was happily surfing the web or using Google maps whilst driving around.

So I am as keen as everyone to see RG working on tablets, but I suspect that it is less useful/satisfying on a small phone screen. It may be that routes will need to be added via a computer but viewable on tablets etc. I'm keener to just get something working well that isn't reliant on Java, if that means sacrificing the ability to add routes via a touch interface in the shorter (or even longer) term I think that's a price worth paying.

Once Simon has got most of the bugs sorted I can start looking at adding the option to clubs RG accounts.

[usuallylast]

Am I correct in thinking our club would need to pay the annual OS licence fee to display the maps on the website if we wanted to install this ourselves, and will routegadget uk still be an available option?

[Simon E]

Am I correct in thinking our club would need to pay the annual OS licence fee to display the maps on the website if we wanted to install this ourselves, and will routegadget uk still be an available option?

Yes, the OS situation stays exactly the same, so you need an OS license for each "website" that displays OS copyright material. Paul Frost, who runs routegadget uk, is keen to see RG2 developed and rolled out so this will still be an option.

Each club that has a routegadget uk account will already have an ftp access account, so they could install RG2 themselves. It sits in parallel with RG1, and you can still use both. Alternatively Paul has indicated that he will help clubs with the installation once we have a slightly more stable version.

[Simon E]

how can I watch runners and know who is who without having their tracks premarked?

Runners that are being replayed are listed on the Replay tab at present, since I don't want to lose yet more screen space. The better option may be to display names or at least initials next to the moving dots (easy to do so it may come soon), or to include names as tooltips if you hover over the dots.

[orient]

Each club that has a routegadget uk account will already have an ftp access account, so they could install RG2 themselves. It sits in parallel with RG1, and you can still use both. Alternatively Paul has indicated that he will help clubs with the installation once we have a slightly more stable version.

Have uploaded the rg2 files to our rg uk site. Think its looking very good already. I've noticed a minor problem, if the name of the event name includes an apostrophe the event title looks gibberish (it shows the html code &#39; instead of the ' )

[Paul Frost]

I think that's you not RG.
If you look at Daisey's Wood event the apostrophe shows correctly.
I suspect that the event title was copy/pasted from a Word document rather than typed in, and that's where it's come from.
There are different codes for apostrophes depending on your viewpoint

&#39; is the "mixed-use" ascii apostrophe/single quote. But the Unicode standard says you should prefer &#8217; for apostrophe and right single quote and &#8216; for left single quote.

See this website for more info about HTML Symbol Entities