First off, i want to say that modRana was an essential tool for the Boston-to-Canada bike tour i just completed. I decided it fit my use case better than Navit because i was pregenerating routes in Google Earth/maps and needed a lightweight app to display the track overlaid on a map with several different map options for different tasks (i.e. satellite images for finding good campsites, topo cycle map for seeing hilliness, OSM for seeing road names and features). So, thanks for your work!

However, all wasn't peaches and cream:

• I found the process of precaching map tiles to be very time consuming. Ideally i wanted to download all the tiles along my route at a zoomed out level and a zoomed in level, and just switch between them. This proved more difficult than i had anticipated because
  • there's no indication of which zoom level you are currently at (besides the scale bar). Recommendation: show zoom level in download menu and/or provide absolute zoom level options instead/as well as +/- levels.
  • 5 km is the minimum range option, and 5 km to either side of a 450 mile route at a high zoom is a lot of tiles. Recommendation: provide a 1 km or 1 tile option.
  • The number of tiles doesn't seem consistent with the actual coverage. I wish i could comment more on this, but basically i mean that it's possible to see the tile boundaries on screen and the actual number of tiles needed is a lot less than the estimated number that modRana wants to download at times. This may just be confusion on my part/loss in translation about what's going on. Recommendation: no idea.
  • Ability to omit zoom levels accessed by using + and - icons in GUI. Perhaps this is an option in the configuration file. Bonus points: It would be really neat if there was an option that would only step up/down the zoom if the tiles are already cached for the present view area.
  • The UI for activating tracks is a bit confusing at first, but once i figured out what was going on it was ok, if a bit cumbersome. The ability to click-and-hold on a track on screen to access its menu would be wonderful, but i realize that may not be easy to implement.
• After browsing through a lot of different areas of map, especially with different maps enabled, the N900 becomes unresponsive and requires a reset.
• Even without browsing around in the map, if i left modRana running for an extended period (say > 1 hr), it eventually would cause a lockup or reboot. If i was careful to close modRana after each reference i had no trouble, but the process of starting up and loading all the tracks was time (and battery) conusming. Activating a track seems to aggravate this tendency. I noticed a few times after the N900 had reset that the battery was significantly drained (e.g. 8 bars to 2), suggesting something had pegged the CPU. This led to some really tricky situations where i had to delay the trip a bit to charge up. I don't report this by way of complaint because i knew taking a new and relatively untested app along was signing up as a beta tester, but hopefully this report will help these issues get worked out.

Due to these issues, i used the gpsrecorder app to track my route instead of modRana, and that worked okay.

You could make this a configurable option, i guess, but i don't use any other tile mappers and would really appreciate some solution to the cluster size issue. Even just adding some hack like the ability of modrana to read into .tar archives in the .maps directory that a user creates by hand would be fine with me.

Thanks again for your work on this. It's fantastically useful for this kind of usage!