bookmark

What are landmarks and waypoints?

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Introduction: Landmarks in TrailRunner mini can be:
  • Just a geographic bookmark (or point of interest) you can set for yourself. Add landmarks to easily jump to a location by selecting the landmark in the landmarks popover.
  • A shortcut for routing. Within this context a landmark becomes a waypoint.
As the prior is pretty simple to understand, the latter requires some explanations.

Route and Landmarks. The following quick tutorial shows how you start a new route from an existing landmark. Then, during routing, the tutorial shows how a new landmark is being added and how the route returns to the point where you have started.



Please note that the route created used two intermediate transit location pins to direct the routing over the specific course of the demo.
So it's basically a route from the starting landmark over a transit pin to the newly created signpost landmark over a second transit pin and back to the starting landmark. (Expert users could have used the roundtrip setting in the left route planning pane to omit the last step)

Landmark Intelligence. When you connect two landmarks (even by placing intermediate transit location pins) TrailRunner mini remembers the course you have chosen to reach a landmark outgoing from a previous landmark. After this has happened (and as soon as you create a route that follows the same course of landmarks) TrailRunner mini will be able to directly connect the two landmarks — based on the memorized course. No intermediate transit locations required. The second quick tutorial shows how that happens:



Shortest vs. favored. If you are not very accustomed to how routing without landmarks works, just realize that routing in TrailRunner mini uses the shortest path to reach one transit location to another. But that's typically not what you want. So what happens is that you are always compelled to insert intermediate transit locations until the course matches your intention. Now as landmarks remember their connections to other landmarks, this manual correction is only required once. So what you could do now is that you place some hot locations on your map (that you regularly come along during your workout courses) and TrailRunner mini will automatically connect these with the courses you planned in the past — and not the course that is shortest.

Offroad-Routing. The other effect that comes in useful is that landmark to landmark courses can contain off-road transit locations. So whenever the underlying map source is incomplete, just layout an off-road course between two landmarks and TrailRunner mini will extend the map coverage by your means.

Offline-Routing. As landmarks memorize their past connections to other landmarks in the map, no network requests are being fired to route between two such landmarks. This effectively gives you limited off-line routing.

Export and Import. Routes created in TrailRunner mini that make use of landmarks will contain these as waypoints in exported GPX files. Importing GPX files containing waypoints (wpt-tag) will also import these as landmarks. To learn more about the GPS eXchange Format, read its wikipedia article.

Summary. That's basically all you need to know about landmarks in TrailRunner mini. To learn more, check out the additional information provided in the landmarks popover, next to the landmark attributes.

Live or let die. Please note that I create TrailRunner mini in my spare-time. So if you have feedback and questions, contact me directly via application feedback. If you like TrailRunner mini, please spend some stars on the AppStore review. Have fun.