Compass 55 v1.9. What's new?

Units of measurement - REWORK

All the places in the app where units of measurements would not be shown have been adjusted to show them. Same applies to degrees or mils in compass/course.

You can now set when feet or meters should switch to miles (or nautical miles) and kilometers:

By default, everything stays as it used to be. BUT, you have a lot of new options now! If you are like John who wrote me "Stan, I need to keep the app measuring/tracking in feet as this is what I'm using for everything on my farm and I don't want it to be switching to miles" - then these new options are for you.

Also feet or meters can now be used for altitude totally independently on other units.

These new settings can be access via settings > "Units of measurement".

Option for showing whole current track on the main map

Whole currently being recorded (ACTIVE) track can be shown on the main map (Google, Apple, blank and offline). As always, you can "pin" any previously recorded track to the main map (light blue), while active track will be shown in red:

I even took the liberty to set this as ON by default. If you want to disable this active track "tail", please open common map settings and you'll find new options down to the bottom:

New to version 1.9 is also ability to hide the "tail" completely.

"Photo GPX" track export option

This was initiated by David from UK and grand thanks to him for providing the requirements and also testing in Lightroom. David also kindly put a document together to describe how it all works in practice:

Photo Export GPX (Photo Geotagging)

"Photo GPX" export options ensures that you'll have a time/location sample per each second in the output GPX. Why it would not happen by itself? Imagine GPS would not be available for some time, and the app as well optimizes the track recording by filtering out some points to keep the track size smaller (Can be configured in Advanced Settings > GPS Tracking > Optimize recording).

You can find this option between current track export options:

Support for areas - Planimeter

Idea with areas was to be able to setup "don't enter" or "don't leave" areas or flight altitude corridor areas, but then I decided to add fully-fledged planimeter functions and get to areas alerts later:

More information:

Measuring routes and areas (planimeter).

Export of planimeter objects (Routes and Areas)

Area and length units of measurement (planimeter).

Improvements in route/waypoint navigation

Based on Michel's suggestions.

1. Search bar in the waypoints list is visible by default.

2. SET TARGET menu now has one more option - to pick a nearby waypoint to navigate to:

Previously it was only Recent - by default.

3. MENU > WAYPOINTS now contains a sub option to open nearby waypoints:

Michel had way more suggestions to help him navigate as a helicopter pilot. Adding these 3 now and will focus on map related features in the next version.

Credit and huge thanks go to Michel!

Miscellany

• Performance of viewing and exporting huge tracks is greatly improved.

This is it for version 1.9, I'm back to adding new features for the next version! If you like the app and would not mind supporting it, please review or rate the app. As easy as tapping here and leaving me a few words! Yours, Stan, the dev.

More information for version 1.9

Area and length units of measurement (planimeter).

General units of measurement - Metric, Imperial, Nautical.

Distance units of measurement.

Altitude units of measurement.

Automatic switch from small to big units.

Here is an overview of planned features for version 2.0:

- Distance measurement for turn by turn routes (car, bike, walk profiles)

- Voice navigation along the track (alert when more that X meters/feet away from the pinned track)

- Automatically skip to the next target along the route if missed the previous/current target

- Datums

- Magnetic variation data for any coordinate

- Vertical speed

- GPS diagnostics panel/chart

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