CycleStreets blog

This is a guest post from our mobile developer, Alan Paxton, about our forthcoming new iPhone app (which we've been able to do as a result of grants from the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund and Cycle Cambridge).

I'm going to be one of the people giving a 5-minute talk to Edinburgh Techmeetup tonight (http://techmeetup.co.uk/blog/). I will demonstrate the CycleStreets iPhone app I've been working on for a while now, and which is currently in test, planning for a release during Cycle Week. On that subject, I would be happy if anyone would volunteer themselves as a beta tester; I can't offer much of a reward beyond an honourable mention on this blog, or maybe in the app credits ? Get in touch if you'd like to try it out. I'm already checked in to techmeetup (at http://www.getbloop.com/)

The slideshow is a demo of the app. The main features are:

A Cycle Journey Planner which is aware of cycle paths and lesser trafficed roads. Of course, the journey planner is part of the core CycleStreets service, and as far as the app is concerned it's a routing black box. But that's the point.

You can use the GPS location to locate yourself on the map, and place a rout endpoint automatically.

You can use the CycleStreets namefinder to look up towns, streets or postcodes and place a route endpoint there.

Photomap. This is a cycle campaigning and information tool that maintains a database of geotagged photographs relevant to the cycling infrastructure. Using the app, you can see photomap photos on the section of the map you're looking at, and you can upload photos to photomap direct from your iPhone.

For those of you who are interested in this sort of thing, the app uses the RouteMe slippy maps library, accessing OpenStreetMap maps through the Cloudmade services. Although some of the features are not as slick as Google maps, it allows recent map tiles to be cached on the device, and generally does not suffer from tricky to understand licence niggles like the MapKit does. OpenStreetMap is a community mapping initiative, so if you're interested you can add insanely detailed mapping information for the POIs you know and love.

As previously announced, we're busily preparing a new iPhone app.

We mentioned in our last posting that the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund has kindly given us a grant of £5,000 towards this project. We’re extremely grateful to the Trustees of the Fund for their support – their funding has enabled this much-requested new interface for CycleStreets to come about.

We're pleased to announce today a further grant of just under £2,000 from Cycle Cambridge, which will enable us to complete the mobile project for our initial release. They are doing excellent work here in Cambridge to improve infrastructure and get more people on their bikes, and this grant is one of many ways in which they are helping to promote cycling in Cambridge and the surrounding area.

The two grants will be used for the iPhone development costs and improvements to the core journey planning algorithm/speed to support mobile use for all platforms.

The app will be released free-of-charge, and we expect to launch later this month, possibly during Bike Week.

We've also received a couple of offers to help with an Android app, which is great news. If you can help with either an Android app or ongoing development of the iPhone one, do let us know.

Here's a screen snapshot of work in progress on CycleStreets.

It shows the shortest route from Dover to Cape Wrath – i.e. the entire length of the country! Basically it uses the A1 – so the Romans were about right then!

We've been working on a much faster routing engine that will, as a side-effect, also enable longer distances to be done.

More news soon.