Just to keep you updated, we are working on the feature and likely slowly roll it out during the summer.

Oh and one more thing, we did release a bugfix release couple weeks ago fixing adding favourites. WE believe that the features will the base of a lot of things in this app and they will likely be renamed to “Saved” or “Bookmarks” since you might have a location that is not your favourite but would like to use it as a reference to a lot of other stuff.

But more on that later!

It seems that some things behave a bit different between dev and prod so we needed to address some features with this bugfix release.

Non of the major features were broken but we are talking about missing assets and such.

Appearance

We thought that web development was difficult for the reason that the web page gets used by several different browsers and devices, even same browser behave very much differently on different platforms or devices.

However, just with one mobile phone, you can make pretty drastic changes on how you want the stuff to be presented to you and this is in the same device, same model, same browser.

User having dark mode, or dark appearance, activated was seeing black text on black background due to poorly made colour decision.

Similar problem with another user has max text size combined with display zoom and lets say that there were some difficulties placing elements in a form correctly.

Fix

This is exactly what QA is for and we admit, we rushed the first released.

Xcode will give you excellent tools combating both of these scenarios mentioned above. The build-in preview will let you see the view in dark appearance and with a lot of different combinations of zoom/text size tweaks on. So there is no excuse for this.

This is the kind of stuff that makes Xcode a very impressive piece of software, how it streamlines with the target device.

Quick v2 update: Tiles are being placed on the globe

Our data is getting crunched to a more favourable format and we expect to be able to start testing with it next week. There will likely be separate elevation query tool update in the near future which will allow you to experience the terrain in full 3d and then the rest of the stuff in the v2 roadmap much later.

It feels to us that this 3d map explorer is such a center tool in this space to improve the accuracy and experience of the tool that we want to roll it out as soon as possible. It is unbelievable how it opens the world you already know to a different kind of exploration from birds eye perspective. You can rediscovers some places you never knew were like that or even remind yourself of some old things that you haven’t seen in a while. Now fully explorable.

Once the new map tool is released, we will take a breather, and do a write up of the GIS process involved, for all the geeks out there, who knows, maybe you want to do something like this yourself?

While we don’t want to just stick the whole roadmap here, there is a summary of it in the end tldr. Also, we will go a little bit in the detail what is this v2 all about and the future v3 or long term goals we are trying to achieve with this application: Who is it for and why?

Background

The whole v1 started as a simple elevation map tool, the goal was to let everyone check any coordinate on this globe for its elevation, for free, forever. This should be part of human rights.

We quickly realized that just a map and click won’t really cut it but is already very useful for many situations so we went ahead for the v1 just to give some relief for those poor humans without rights out there who can’t figure out how tall is that hill they watch everyday.

Enter Copernicus deep dive

So after dealing with the copernicus dem 30m resolution geotiff data, we realized that the elevation query is just the tip of the iceberg and is only a 1d thing (as in dimensions). You query for one point and then you are happy, or are you? Those geotiff files provide much more when you look at them as a group, you group all those 1d points together and soon enough, you see a mountain forming, a bit like Neo reading the matrix.

So we figured that we can draw our own 3d landscape from it. SO you could see the mountains and terrain in their actual shapes. And why to stop there, we have the same data for oceans as well, those deeps pits sounds scary, what can you find in the bottom?

However, this needs a bit of processing. When we say “a bit”, we mean “a lot”, or well, it depends what kind of CPU power you have access to. But even the modern 24 core CPU’s chew this stuff quite a long time. And a lot of things get a lot easier if you happen to be able to acquire, lets say 8TB+ of very fast ssd memory. And we did.

So I guess we can finally say it, the v2 will introduce 3d map where you can see your favourite spots around the world in 3d and freely rotate the camera. This includes once again, the whole globe, as copernicus represents it. We are also introducing v2 of the elevation query tool, which will operate on the 3d map and will provide more info besides just the elevation in that point. It will be much easier to pinpoint the location you want since you can see the 3d terrain.

This allows us also to pre-show local peaks without you even querying them.

We could also talk about hillshading, but lets leave something for the future blog posts.

Our material is processing inside the CPUs as we speak and we will be rolling out the 3d map as soon as there is global coverage for it. Here is a short video of it right now:

Roadmap, hello?

So now we revealed the first and likely the biggest single change or new feature of the upcoming v2 and it is safe to move to the other things.

Without further ado, and without much of description:

• iWatch integation

  • We are also looking into CarPlay, but so far Apple does not like to let us in your car, lets see what happens here

• Favourites upgrade

  • Show all in map, compare or update their elevation according to copernicus, allow editing favorites

• Location tracking from point A to point B

  • This is very nice if you want to profile your hiking track or dog walk path and get some insights

• Visibility tool v2 will also take into account objects between the observer and the subject

  • So you can finally identify what you see or can you see x

• Cloud sync, so all your devices will keep in sync

• More languages? Portugal, Deutch and Polish likely coming in

V3 and forward

This tool is always aimed for the elevation geeks and try very hard not to be the “hiking app” or navigation app, or sports tracker.

The only feature in the v3 horizon is a camera AR silhoutette, but we can talk about it more later.

Contact

If you have nay questions or suggestins for the future releases please don’t hesitate to contact us at help@elevato.app or just go into the comments section

Initial release now available with some pretty basic functionality so far.

If you just want to know what is the elevation of that mountain or that place there, just open the map tool and check it.

Also we included basic visibility tool to calculate visibility of long distances when earths curvature starts to play a role.

Other than that, you can add favourites or try to get the highest record elevation among your friends etc.

Releasing

Took us a while to jump all the hoops in app store, but this also gave us time to start work already on the version 2.0, which is well underway, you can read more about it in a future blog post.

What is this?

if you don’t know, visit elevato.app for more info