CityCyclist 1.0

tldr; I made an app for bike navigation, you can download it here.

For a few months, in slivers of spare time, I’ve been working on a little app for city bike navigation, called CityCyclist.

I’ve tried to build something clean and accessible, that gets a good bike route on the screen as quickly as possible. That’s glanceable while on a bike, and more useful when off.

KEY INNOVATIONS!

There’s a little scrubber on the elevation profile at the bottom to fly quickly along a route without zooming and panning around. My hypothesis was that might make it easier to consign a route to memory. I suspect that’s not true, but I still like it.

The search results use a combination of Foursquare and Apple’s address geocoder, and seem fairly good.

The routing is powered by CycleStreets (backed by OpenStreetMap) with a selection of three options: fast, balanced, quiet. (UK only for now.)

END KEY INNOVATIONS!

I think version 1.0 is a good base for future experiments. I’d like to try a take on turn-by-turn navigation that works when the phone is in your pocket or bag, and I’d like to find a feedback loop to improve routing/map data. But this’ll do for now.

It’s in the App Store now and it’s free. If you give it a try, I’d love to know what you think. Get it here.

(PS: If you work for the kind of organisation that would benefit from me supporting, improving, and getting this app to as many people as possible, and want to help out, do get in touch.)