The map speaks your language too

PitStopper has been translated into eight languages for a while, but the map underneath was always English - and where a place had no English name, whatever the local mapper wrote. Now the map's own labels follow the interface, so a French rider planning a route through Belgium sees Anvers and Bruxelles rather than Antwerpen and Brussel.

There is an override in Settings → Preferences, because the two are genuinely different questions. Pick any of our languages for the map independently of the interface, or choose Local names to see every place exactly as it is written on the ground - which is the one you want when you will be following the road signs. The language pickers now live in Preferences as well as the header.

No extra download: the map data already carries names in 75 languages, we simply were not asking for them.

Turn instructions you can read at a glance

Left and right turns are now drawn with a bent arrow rather than a straight one, the way a junction sign shows the road turning. A plain left arrow says "left is that way", which is a compass direction; the bent one says "the road turns here", which is the instruction.

Roundabouts now show the exit number in a circle everywhere - the map marker and the side panel included, not just imported files. On a route we matched ourselves the marker was drawing an ordinary turn arrow while the text beside it read "Take the 1st exit onto Headley Road". The printed turn sheet gets both changes too.

The map now shows the shape of the ground

The main map is hill shaded. Ridges, valleys and the sides of a climb are visible at a glance, which for anyone planning a ride or a walk is the difference between a route that goes over a hill and one that goes around it. There is a button in the bottom-right corner of the map to turn it off, and it is on by default.

We have had relief shading in the 3D view and in Route Video for a while, but not on the flat map that most planning actually happens on. This is the same elevation data, so it costs no new download and works with every OpenFreeMap style. Shading applies to the OpenFreeMap vector map; on the satellite and other raster layers the button is greyed out.

A turn list that matches the one in your navigation app

Roundabouts are now drawn as a numbered circle - the exit number in a ring, exactly as Cruiser shows it. The circling arrow they used to have was wrong wherever traffic goes the other way round: it pointed clockwise, which is how a British rider takes a roundabout and the exact opposite of how a Belgian one does. A number needs no such opinion.

The list now opens and closes properly too. An imported navigation file gets the road it sets off along, taken from the file's own first point, so the list no longer starts on a turn you only reach after riding the length of an unnamed road. And every list ends with "Arrive at destination", rather than stopping at the last turn with nothing to say the instructions have run out.

Each distance has also moved one row, onto the instruction it belongs to. Standing at a turn, the number you want is how far until the next one, not how far you have come since the last. Checked side by side against Cruiser on the same file: the two lists now agree row for row and metre for metre.

Roundabout exits now reach Cruiser and Locus

The exit number a matched track works out is now written into the exported GPX, so the app you navigate with says it too, not just PitStopper. It goes in the turn symbol at the roundabout entry, which is where Locus and Cruiser look for it: roundabout_e3 is "take the third exit".

Reading files has widened to match. PitStopper now recognises every announced turn instruction those two apps support, including exits, slip roads, merges, destinations and left or right u-turns, so an imported navigation file shows what its author meant rather than falling back to "Continue".

A turn list you can read down

Each turn now gets the full width for its instruction, with the distance and time on a line beneath it and the edit and delete buttons stacked at the right. Before, the instruction was sharing one line with both of them and had about 120 pixels to live in, so "Turn right onto Pearson Road" wrapped to four lines and every row was a different height.

On the Surface tab, "Show surface colours on the map" has moved up to sit directly under the tabs, where Turn-by-turn keeps its own map toggle. It is the same question on both tabs, so it should not be in a different place on each. The surface list itself is tighter as well, and now fits on screen instead of showing two rows at a time.

Roundabouts: take the third exit

A matched track now reads roundabouts the way a sat-nav does: one instruction as you arrive, saying which exit to take and the road it leads onto, instead of a scatter of small turns around the ring.

Counting them properly took more care than it sounds. OpenStreetMap usually stores a roundabout as several separate arcs, so they are gathered back into one junction first - on a 44 km Berkshire ride, 23 roundabout ways were 6 actual roundabouts. Where the arms are dual carriageways each one touches the ring twice, so only the half you could leave by is counted, and service roads, tracks and private drives are skipped unless that is where you went. Nothing under about 15 metres across is numbered at all, because "take the first exit" is a silly way to say "turn right".

None of it needs to know which side of the road a country drives on: OpenStreetMap draws every roundabout in the direction its traffic goes, so counting forward along the ring is right in Belgium and in Britain alike.

Pick the map from the map

The buttons at the bottom left of the map gain a Map layer chooser: Streets, Satellite, Topographic, Cycling, Outdoors and OpenFreeMap, the same list as View → Map Layer but within reach of the thing it changes. Each has a swatch of its own colours so you can pick by eye.

The palette button beside it changes the style of the OpenFreeMap layer, and only that layer has styles, so on any other map it is now greyed out with a tooltip saying why rather than opening a menu that does nothing.

Two fixes on the turn list

Turn markers were being drawn underneath the route's direction arrows, so an arrow sitting on a junction hid the instruction for it. They now have a layer of their own above the arrows.

And opening the turn list from Match to Roads then closing it now takes you back to Match to Roads, rather than dropping you on the Search panel you had been on before any of it started.

Turn markers say the road, and can become a POI

Hovering a turn marker on the map now reads the same sentence as the turn list, road name included: "Turn right onto Palokenstraat" rather than just "Turn right". Both are built by one function now, so they cannot drift apart again.

Clicking a turn marker opens a small panel with how far into the ride it is and an Add a POI here button. A junction is often worth remembering as well as navigating, and the POI lands on the turn's own coordinates rather than wherever you managed to click.

Route Video: music

Your video can now have a soundtrack. Eight tracks, ordered from calmest to briskest, from a gentle ukulele to drum & bass. Pick one from the Music list in the video panel and it plays as you choose it, so you can hear it against the route before committing to a render. The track is looped or trimmed to the exact length of your film and faded at both ends, and the choice starts at None, so nothing is added unless you ask for it. All eight are levelled to the same loudness, so moving down the list changes the mood and not the volume.

The music is free for you to use, including on a monetised channel. Six of the eight are public domain (CC0) and ask nothing at all; the other two are Creative Commons Attribution, and their credit appears on the end card automatically, which is what that licence asks in return. Anything with a NoDerivatives, NonCommercial or ShareAlike clause is deliberately absent: setting music to moving images counts as an adaptation, we cannot know whose channel your video ends up on, and ShareAlike would put your own video under the same licence.

Route Video: a clock, a route legend, and a closing credit

The player now shows where you are and how long the finished video will be, as minutes and seconds beside the scrubber, so you know what you are about to record before you record it.

Route legend is a new option: a small diagram of the whole ride in the top right corner, with a dot moving along it as the video plays. It keeps the shape of your route rather than stretching it to fill the box, and it corrects for longitude being shorter than latitude, so a north-south ride looks like a north-south ride.

You can also give the film your own opening title and a sentence or two, shown on a card over the first shot and gone by the time the camera dives in. Both are empty by default, so nothing appears unless you write it, and the card follows your typing as you go.

Videos now open and close with Made at PitStopper.net. It fades out as the opening dive begins, so it reads as a title rather than a watermark, and it returns on the end card. The opening one can be turned off; the closing one stays.

The match offer no longer hides behind a dismissed dialog

The offer to match a recorded ride to the roads appeared only inside the import summary, which has a "Don't Show Again" button. Anyone who had ever pressed that never saw it, because they had dismissed a summary of what was imported rather than the one line in it about what to do next. When the summary is turned off, the offer now appears on its own at the foot of the screen instead.

Fixed alongside it: the Show import summary preference did nothing. A boolean setting was being compared against the text "true", so only the older "Don't Show Again" button ever actually hid the dialog.

Print your turn instructions, with a picture of every junction

Export → Print Turn Instructions, or the link above the turn list, makes a sheet of every turn: the instruction, the road it leads onto, the distance to it and the running total, with a small map of each junction beside it. There is a map of the whole route at the top. Both pictures can be turned off if you would rather have a plain list. The menu entry is greyed out when the route has no turn instructions.

The junction pictures are drawn here from the same map tiles the app uses, so there is no third-party service involved and the print matches the screen. A 45 km ride with 47 turns takes a few seconds to prepare. Rows never split across a page break, because half a junction picture at the foot of one sheet is no use on the road.

Turn lists start where you do, and the arrows mean something

A turn list used to open on its first turn, which is not the first thing that happens: you ride the length of a road to reach it, and nothing said which way to set off. Every list now opens with Head south-west on Badgers Rise, read from the route's own first stretch and the road beneath it.

The turn arrows have been put on one compass. They previously mixed two ideas, with an up arrow for "continue" but a right-angle glyph for a sharp turn and nothing pointing backwards at all, so a slight left showed the most rearward arrow in the set and read as "go back the way you came". Now up is ahead, a slight turn is 45 degrees off it, a turn is 90, and a sharp turn genuinely points backwards. Roundabouts get a circling arrow and the words "At the roundabout"; previously they had neither and were labelled "Continue".

The Surface tab now opens with the answer rather than the detail: a bar in the map's own colours showing how much of the ride is paved, unpaved and unrecorded, with a percentage and a distance against each. Hovering a stretch in the list picks it out on the map, and clicking one frames it, the way the turn list already worked.

Routes planned from scratch get road surface too. The roads are already fetched to name the turns, so the surface comes from the same request, and the Surface tab and its map colours now work for a planned route as well as a matched one.

Road surface, for free, from the match

Matching a track to the roads now also reads what those roads are made of. The Surface tab of the Navigation data panel, which until now only had anything to say about an imported navigation file, works for any matched track: a list of stretches with their distances, and a toggle to paint them along the route on the map. On a 44 km ride, 70% of the distance has a surface recorded in OpenStreetMap, and the rest is shown honestly as unknown rather than assumed to match its neighbours. The result panel names the mix, for example "Asphalt 30.78km, Unpaved 427m".

It goes into the exported file too, as the same route_information extension Cruiser writes, so a device that understands surface gets it along with the turns. Markers are written only where the surface changes, which is how the format works, and an unknown stretch is marked as such rather than being allowed to inherit its neighbour's. A 44 km ride gains about 2 KB.

It costs nothing. The roads were already fetched to do the matching and every tag came with them; only the road names were being kept. Two bugs turned up in the process: the surface colours understood only the three words a Cruiser navigation file uses, so real OpenStreetMap values like asphalt fell through to the rough-surface orange and painted a tarmac ride as though it were a gravel track. And the coloured overlay could vanish underneath a route line, which it no longer can.

Your stops come with the matched track

Points of interest found along a recording now belong to the matched version too, so the obvious next move, deleting the recording once a cleaner one exists, no longer takes every cafe and water point with it. The panel gained the two decisions it was leading up to: Keep only the matched track, which removes the recording, hands the stops over with their distances re-measured against the new line, and puts the matched route back to a normal colour and width, or Discard it, which puts the recording back exactly as it was. Both are undoable.

The result now opens with a sentence saying whether it went well, rather than leaving you to work that out from four numbers. Climbing is shown before and after when it moves, because a line rebuilt from fewer points counts less GPS wobble as ascent, and the figure dropping by itself is alarming without an explanation. Each place the two lines disagree gets a numbered pin on the map, so you can see whether they are spread through the ride or all in one wood.

Turn instructions on paths are far less noisy. A bend within one road was already ignored where the road had a name, but an unnamed lane or footpath had no name to compare, so every wiggle became an instruction. A 134 km walking trail dropped from 586 turns to 287, and a 44 km ride from 59 to 47.

What the match actually did

Matching a track takes about a second, which is fast enough to look like nothing happened. The result panel now has a What was done section that says otherwise: how many road sections were considered and how many your track used, how many named roads that came to, any repeated or standing-still points that were dropped, how far the new line ever strays from your own, how much of it was kept as recorded because there was no road there, the point count before and after, and how long it took. Most of these were already being worked out and thrown away. It is folded shut, so the four figures that matter stay at the top.

PitStopper spots a recorded ride when you import one

Import a GPS recording and PitStopper now says so, and offers to match it to the roads there and then. It works out which it is from the file itself rather than guessing: a FIT file states outright whether it holds an activity or a course, a heart rate or power reading can only have been measured, and most tools write their own name into the file. Where nothing settles it, the shape of the points does. Checked against twenty-two real files, it never once mistook a planned route for a recording, which is the mistake that matters: nothing is offered unless it is fairly sure.

Match to Roads moves into the sidebar

It was a dialog over the map, for a feature whose whole output is two lines on the map. It now sits in the sidebar beside them, from the "..." menu, so the list of places the two differ stays put while you click through them and nothing covers what you are looking at. The turn list gained a toggle to show or hide the turn markers, which matters once a matched ride has put sixty of them along the line.

Turn-by-turn from a recorded track

Matching a track to the roads now also works out its turns, so a ride you recorded can be exported as a turn-by-turn GPX for Cruiser or Locus Map. Each instruction names the road it leads onto - "Turn left onto Mill Lane" - read from OpenStreetMap at the junction itself. Nothing is re-routed: the turns come from the shape of your own track, so a deliberate detour keeps its turns and a route no planner would choose still gets instructions. Where the ride left the road network entirely the turn is still there, without a road name, rather than missing.

The list is kept short on purpose. OpenStreetMap splits roads at bridges, surface changes and parish boundaries, and calling each of those a turn would give about four instructions per kilometre; following one wiggly lane would read as four separate turns onto the same road. A 53 km route comes out with 35 instructions. Level of detail in the match panel moves that up or down and the list rebuilds instantly, so you can see the effect rather than guess at it.

Every generated turn can be corrected by hand in the Navigation data panel: change the instruction, or remove one that should not be there. Turns that arrived inside an imported file stay read-only, since that file is re-exported exactly as it came in.

Match a track to the roads

A GPS recording wanders either side of the road it was made on, and joining those fixes with straight lines also cuts the corners off every bend. Route → Match to Roads works out which roads you actually used and draws the line along them, giving a cleaner shape and a more honest distance. On a 44 km ride whose bike computer kept its own total, the raw coordinates were 123 m out; the matched line is 77 m out.

Your recording is never altered. The matched version is added as a second route beside it, so you can compare the two and delete either. It follows what you really did, detours to the shops included; Edit Track is still the way to change the route itself. Times, heart rate, power and temperature all come across, and a stop stays a stop, so the ride's elapsed time is preserved to the second. Where the matched line and your recording disagree, the panel says where and by how much rather than leaving you to find it on the road.

The two are drawn to be compared: your recording underneath as a wide green line, the matched version on top as a thin red one, so it reads as a red thread lying in a green channel and any disagreement shows at a glance. Line thickness is now a route setting in its own right, beside the colour, so you can set up that kind of comparison for any two routes.

It works on drawn routes as well as recordings. A route built in another tool has no GPS noise, but it was drawn against that tool's own map, which does not always place a road where OpenStreetMap does; matching lines the two up and fills in the road between points the designer placed far apart. Either way the result follows the track it was given rather than what a router would prefer, so a deliberate detour survives and a road closed since is neither known nor applied.

Road names on a planned route's turns

The turn list of a route planned in PitStopper now says which road each turn leads onto - "Turn left onto Molenstraat" rather than just "Turn left" - and the exported turn-by-turn GPX carries the same names for Cruiser and Locus. The names come from our own copy of OpenStreetMap a moment after the route appears, so nothing waits on them. Where a lane has no name on the map the instruction stays as it was, rather than borrowing the name of the road beside it. Editing a section of the route afterwards names the fresh turns in that section too.

Recording quality

A recorded GPS track is a cloud of fixes with a line's shape, and every wobble between two of them is counted as distance ridden, so a recording always measures a little long. A new Recording Quality entry in the Route menu says so plainly: how many points the ride holds, what those points measure, and any obvious errors found in them. For a FIT file it also shows what your device's own odometer recorded, which is an independent measurement of the same ride and usually the more honest number. The same summary appears on import when the two disagree. Nothing here changes your route; it is an observation, not a correction.