New Feature: Heading Up
Referred to by an array of names, we are excited to announce that Heading Up (also known as “Track Up”) mode is now live in the CalTopo mobile app!
This feature has come highly requested by many different types of users, including Search and Rescue members needing to follow a predetermined route, drivers navigating dirt roads, and backcountry users wondering which trail to take at a junction.
Feature requests for this functionality have been frequent, both via email and through our Feature Request Forum. We even crowdsourced user input as we were creating this new feature (thanks to everyone who contributed their thoughts!).
Side note: if you have other feature requests, go upvote existing posts or create your own on the forum! The Feature Request forum is the main place where we track and monitor user feedback.
Mobile App Changes
Gone are the days of only being able to navigate with north up map orientation in the mobile app! You now have two options for orienting your map when you are displaying your GPS location: Locked mode and Heading Up mode.
In Locked mode, your map’s orientation is fixed. The map viewer will center on your location and the blue heading arrow will move to indicate which direction your device is currently facing. This was previously called “Keep Centered” in the 4-dot Location menu.
In Locked mode the map orientation is fixed and the blue heading arrow moves to reflect the direction you are facing.
In Heading Up mode, your map moves with you! In this mode, the map viewer will also center on your location but the entire map will rotate based on the direction that the device is facing. If you use Heading Up while tracking yourself on an outing, then the direction you are traveling will always be at the top of your screen.
Check it out in action! In the video below you can see how the entire map rotates as you do, keeping the heading (or the direction you are facing) up at the top of the map viewer.
You can find detailed instructions on how to interact with and use Locked mode and Heading Up mode in the Orienting the Map section of our user guide.
We hope you are excited to give this feature a try! Got comments or questions about this new feature? Let us know below or email us at help@caltopo.com.
Thanks for this great Heading Up feature. CalTopo rules all others.
…Joe
Thanks Joe! We are biased but we certainly agree.
This is awesome and a really helpful feature for the SAR professionals.
Glad you will find this useful Keith. It was one of our most requested features.
It’s not working for me. Nothing changes when I double tap the crosshairs. I went to the Google Play store and didn’t see an update for the app so I think I’m running the current version.
Send us an email to help@caltopo.com so we can help trouble shoot. If you can ensure you are on 1.10.3 (tap the three bar menu upper left, go to settings and scroll to the bottom).
Happy to see this feature request get implemented. Had fun using it today on my “Southbound” drive. 🙂
Glad you are already using it!
Thanks this will really improve the speed of my night navigation! I can stop using two apps on my mobile device. No longer have to load two sets of maps. It is like an early birthday present.
Happy Birthday! We planned it for you 😉
Does this affect device battery life?
When the app is backgrounded, the GPS is not in use. However if you keep Heading Up locked on and your screen on/the app in use, this will use more battery than not having heading up/gps locked on. Here’s how you can turn it off: https://training.caltopo.com/all_users/mobile/navigation#gpsoff
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I absolutely loathe this new feature. In fact, my whole crew of wildlife biologists do. May I suggest adding to the settings a way to have a “hard turn off” for this feature? While tracking animals, we might hear an individual, then we’ll take a bearing and estimate its distance. Then we’ll create a bearing line of the estimated length in CalTopo to have a point to navigate to. Tracking down the animal is extremely dynamic, and we’re often running through rough terrain, often at night. We’re frequently tapping the “keep centered” button, sometimes while our eyes our focused on the terrain. This causes us to constantly tap the “keep centered” button too early, while the map is supposedly “locked”, and take it into “heading up” mode. The constantly rotating map of “heading up” is much too dizzying while running through brush and jumping over logs as we’re always looking at our phones while moving around. It feels like looking at a map while drunk. This type of navigating while tracking animals has us constantly going in and out of each mode, with the map holding still, then spinning, then holding still, etc. It gets frustrating very quickly. If there was a way to have a “hard turn off” in the settings so we had the option of using the map the old way, it’d make our life so much easier. Thank you <3
Hi Dustin –
In the old version of the app, single-pressing the location button was a “one shot” location request that would keep the blue dot on the screen for something like 30 seconds, and you could long-press on it to keep the GPS on and the map centered on your location indefinitely. With this latest change, a single-press on the location button keeps the blue dot on and the map centered on you indefinitely, unless you pan the map, at which point the icon changes to no longer be locked and single-pressing it resumes centering the map on your location.
We’re wondering if you are panning the map and are needing to re-center, or if you just have muscle memory from the old approach where you were constantly re-tapping the button to center the map, which is no longer needed?
I’d also suggest trying the “navigate to” feature. When you tap on your destination and choose “navigate to”, the app displays a directional arrow that may be easier to glance at while in motion, so that you can make course corrections without having to look at the underlying map.
– Matt
Shoot, I didn’t know about the previous ability to long press the location button to keep GPS on! Our use is closer to what you described about the muscle memory of the old approach where we constantly re-tapped the button, less to center the map, but to keep the GPS from turning off. I just spent a few minutes with the updated app, in a setting where I’m not frantically chasing things around the woods, and now realize that in the new “locked” mode the GPS never turns off. This is very beneficial to our work–thank you for this. We’ll just have to train ourselves to stop pressing the button more than once and to long press, instead of single pressing over to “heading up” mode, to get back to normal.
Thanks for the reply and sorry to bug you before fully understanding the change. Change is hard!