Design a trail before you walk it

Shipped the week of August 3.

Most trail software can record a trail that already exists. This week was about the part that comes before it — standing on a hillside with an idea, and wanting to know whether the line in your head is buildable before anybody picks up a tool.

Suggest a line, in a style

Drop two points and TrailsIQ works out a route between them across real terrain. What changed this week is that you say what KIND of trail you are asking for, and the answer follows.

A chill climb holds a grade ceiling and takes the switchbacks it needs to do it. An aggressive descent spends grade to keep the line direct. The route respects the choice rather than treating every trail as the same problem, and every threshold behind it is yours to move.

Two more things you can hand it. Waypoints — tap the map and the line goes through that saddle, that rock, that view. And a trail-crossing setting, so a new line either avoids what is already on the ground or is told how many crossings you will accept.

When the terrain genuinely cannot give you what you asked for, it says so in an amber banner and shows you the closest it could get, rather than quietly returning something steeper than you specified.

Edit it on the hill, not back at the desk

A suggested line is a starting point. The field app now edits one properly:

• Redraw a section — pick two points on the line and replace only what is between them
• Undo, as many steps back as you need
• Live stats while you drag, so you can see a change get better or worse as you make it
• Compare two versions of the same trail side by side, with the difference in length, climb, grade and cost spelled out

You can also share the whole thing as a PDF from the phone — the map, the elevation profile, the stats and the estimate, in a document you can hand to a land manager before you have left the trailhead.

Read the ground

Three terrain overlays now work on every map in the product — the dashboard, the field app, and every planning surface:

• Contour lines, with the interval following your zoom and every fifth line drawn heavier
• Slope shading, so steep ground reads at a glance
• Aspect — which way a slope faces, on an eight-point compass. This is the one that tells you where the snow lingers and where the mud does.

Terrain analysis is on the Starter plan and above.

Also this week

Measure — a tool in the field app's map sheet for measuring distance and area, in whichever units you work in, with the results opening the records they cover.

Drawing tools — the photo and map annotator gained a freehand pen, straight lines and polygons, with fill as a slider rather than a separate tool. Marks stay editable afterwards, so the next person can move them rather than starting over.

A Marginal condition for structures, sitting between Fair and Poor. Five grades where there were four, because "it is not fair any more but it is not poor either" was a real thing inspectors kept needing to say.

The field app survives being killed. Phones reclaim memory from background apps, and a long day of mapping is exactly when that happens. Work in progress is now restored rather than lost.