Preview Upcoming Map Object & SAR Changes
Update: These changes are live on the site as of March 4th. Please see Update: Map Object & SAR Changes for more details.
Explore Upcoming Changes
We’re proud that so many people rely on CalTopo for both personal and professional use. We don’t take that trust for granted and moving forward, we’re excited to explore some new ways to offer you previews of upcoming major changes. Our goal is to allow you to explore new features and updates as well as prepare your organization prior to those changes going live.
A few things to note about our previews:
- Previews won’t be available for all new features and updates. Currently we plan to focus previews on changes that impact existing user workflows.
- Previews are meant to help you get familiar with upcoming changes- they are not necessarily the final product. Be aware there may be additional tweaks to a new feature or update before the changes go live.
- When possible, we’ll do our best to provide an estimated date for the change but release dates are subject to change.
- Previews may only be available on specific platforms- for example, the current preview is only available on the web and not the mobile or desktop apps.
We’re stoked to try out some new ways to share major upcoming changes ahead of time- we hope you check them out!
Preview Map Object and SAR Changes
Ok first up- our first preview is live now on web only!
To get started, follow this link: Preview.caltopo.com. (this preview has been taken down as of March 4th). You may need to log in again on the preview site, but changes that you make to maps and data here will carry over to the live site and save to your data. Take some time over the next few weeks to explore the changes to both SAR and Map objects. Documentation in the userguide will be available when the changes are live on CalTopo.com, for now please reference this blog.
If you encounter bugs in the new UI, please let us know at help@caltopo.com. If you are on a CalTopo Team account, we encourage you to share this preview and these changes with your team to help with the transition when the changes are fully live in the next few weeks.
So what is changing with Map Objects & SAR?
All objects:
The Map Objects menu has received a small overhaul. No functionality has been removed, however it may be moved slightly.
- The object edit menu will open on the bottom left side of the map viewer, instead of the right.
- If you have multiple map objects in a small area, a deconfliction menu will appear allowing you to choose which object you want to interact with.
- Once you select an existing map object, you will see several options. To change the object in any way select “edit”. Point info, add photo, transform, profile/terrain stats and other options will all show based on the kind of object you have placed on the map. If you are on a team account you will also see object history.
All the same functionality remains, it may just be in a slightly different location.
SAR/Assignments:
As you explore SAR objects, a few big changes may stand out.
- Assignment objects:
- No more ‘letter’ and ‘number’ fields on assignments – these are now combined into a single “title” field. If you open a map that previously used these two fields, you will now see those combined into text in the title field.
- You can now style assignments individually. Choose the color and style for an assignment area the same as you would any regular map object.
- Display options for assignments still allow you to view assignment status based on op period, priority, status, etc. Default will reset them back to the style set for each assignment.
- Not all fields are visible automatically. To view the extended fields, use the “Show additional fields +” text to expand the assignment card.
- Operational Periods
- We’ve added bulk ops options for operational periods. You can now view the number of related assignments for each Op Period, then select and edit fields on all related assignments at once.
If you have any questions or bugs please email us at help@caltopo.com.
Thanks for giving us the chance to share feedback before big changes launch!
I most often use CalTopo to plan potential hiking and backpacking trips. My typical workflow involves drawing a route or uploading a GPX (eg, from AllTrails), bringing up the profile so I can see distance and elevation gain, then editing the route description to add these two + Shenandoah trail difficulty (sqrt(2 * distance * gain)).
This workflow is great with the current UI, where I can have the edit menu layered above the route profile, and the former doesn’t cover the distance and elevation info in the latter. But in the development UI, there doesn’t seem to be a way to access the edit menu while the profile is open — the edit menu is stuck layered beneath the profile, even if I side the sidebar to open the edit menu after opening the profile — and, if there were, the edit menu would be right on top of the distance and elevation information.
Thanks for the feedback on the edit menu behavior while the profile is open! We shared this with the dev team.
I love the ability to change colors on SAR Polygons, not just recreational ones. But it would be nice to be able to customize the colors for Op Period, Status, etc… (Green/Amber/Red)
I’ve had time to digest these particular upcoming changes and work with them on a preview map, and from my perspective as the Caltopo operator for my SAR team, my work flow hasn’t been disrupted in the least.
For and aside, as long as there are changes coming…………..for folders that are automatically created upon creation of a marker, an assignment, a clue, or lines & polygons, and even when manually creating an OP folder, I would like to have the ability to set how these folders appear upon page loading, rather than them all opening and all objects checked at once. We have the ability to determine the “visibility” of folder objects upon page load and their “labels” for folders that we create ourselves (minus the OP folder), so I’m wondering if it’s possible to make that happen for automatically created folders as well.
The UI upgrades are fantastic.
We use different colors for the Operational Periods. They are not changing color.
If we use bulk ops for assignments and use the randomize colors is there a way to reverse or change back to all one color?
Your best bet is probably to use the Bulk Ops to select all the assignments and change the color back to one color.
Do you have a go-live date for these changes (in particular the assignment name/number combination field) and info as to how this will be exposed by the API? It will require some updates from some backend tools we have at our end.
Thanks for letting us know of the changes – in some ways the colour being a settable property for assignment status will be very convenient for us!
We don’t have a specific release date yet although we anticipate rolling out these changes in the next few weeks. We’ll share more once we get closer and have a better idea of the time frame.
As for your API question, you can take a look by making API requests to preview.caltopo.com instead of caltopo.com. I’m not sure what your backend tools do specifically but the main impact is publicly visible properties changes: switching from letter/number to title for assignments, adding color, etc.
If you have specific questions or run into issues, send us an email at help@caltopo.com and we’d be happy to help you troubleshoot.
When creating an assignment, it would be nice to have UAS or Drone in addition to Air for Resource Type. Drones are being used more and more. It would be good to separate the Crewed vs Uncrewed assignments.
Yes! Need to add this!
I like it. It is nice to see all the line options. I mainly use Caltopo for route planning. Before the only options I had were line color and width.
At first I was thinking that this was not a lot of change. Then I saw what happened with stacking objects and the menu for that is great! no more does the map shift and still not get all the objects on the screen (removing all the option for each object in the bubble was what we needed). I don’t like that the list of objects and the info window are now both on the left side. For mobile, I get it. But for desktop, IDK. I think it would be nice to have the info on the right and the list of objects opposite.
When I select the “analyze terrain” window, the “OK” button does nothing. But the “X” at the top right still works. I think you can just remove the OK button.
When I click on a picture and select edit, the window’s boxes spill over the container. Let me know if you want images to help understand.
I REALLY like that we get to preview this. I don’t this the changes this time will change any process flows for me or my team, but it would have been a shock to some people if it was changed without a heads up, again… so thank you for making this preview happen. I hope we get a preview of the mobile vesion before it goes live. I hope you plan to make the previews come at least a month early so teams have a chance to setup training.
Those bulk ops for op periods will be really nice.
What drove the merging of number and letter assignment fields? i think its a good idea, but what made you do it? This will change some things for SAR Command Assist, so I hope he is ready for it. Can you let him know the chnages to the API before you release this update?
I’m not able to reproduce the bugs you are reporting with “analyze terrain” and photo editing. Can you please send us an email with some details at help@caltopo.com so we can take a closer look?
i ahve submitted an email detailing the issues and more bugs I found, especailly the overlapping objects menu bug.
When are the changes planned to get applied to CalTopo? When is it changing?
We anticipate rolling these changes out in the next few weeks. We will share a more definitive rollout date as we get closer and lock one down.
I want to point a big benefit of the new assignment popup: in the preview, all data fields (plus assignment size) are visible to any access type. This addresses the need for the team briefer to be able to see all data fields in order to give a thorough team briefing, without the need for write-level access. It also allows the team in the field to see all data fields at any point later in the search. It seems like this is true even if connection is lost after initial map load, since all assignment data is grabbed with sync, so that showing the popup doesn’t involve a new internet request.
Hopefully the assignment popup will have all the same data in the app too, when that gets released?
Thanks, this will be a big help. Even right now, we can make this view available to team briefers by having them scan a chrome-generated QR code for the preview version of the incident map. They can view it as a web page on their phone.
Great callout! And yes, we plan to have assignment details visible to all users on the web and mobile app when it rolls out live.
these are helpful additions and the UI is way better after some getting used to.
However, I and a lot of others are still waiting for the function to add a proper legend within the map printer PDF. the custom corner image just does not do it when you need to reference specific icons used within Caltopo.
Any chance of getting functionality that allows the user to toggle the “Title” on or off but still have it listed in the Map Objects section? Along with drone information, would also like to see ATV and off-road functionality.
So far, the change looks nice and more functional.
Thanks.
I don’t mind the UI change too much. Seems fine to me.
But now to see what line weight you have takes an extra click. I liked being able to see the number.
Before (or currently, I guess) it was:
Click line -> Edit -> see lineweight
now it is:
Click line -> Edit -> Click edit icon -> Look at line weight slider and guess/count how many lines are ticked to determine lineweight or click it again and see the number.
So we went from 2 clicks to a verified number, to now it’s 3 clicks plus an ambiguous guess or 4 clicks to actually get the number.
Not an improvement.
Can you add a lineweight number directly to the initial edit window like it is now? So we have that information without clicking again?
thanks!
Interesting, on my maps now, when editing a map object, I am getting the original editing box that shows the line weight right there. On the rightside I still have new UI. I’m cool with it……just an observation.
I have noticed your elevation tool does not work for elevations below sea level; it just stays at zero
In the “Edit Style” page of a point, it would be good to be able to “Show Titles” for the Recreation icons (searching helps me find icons faster). It would also be good to see icon titles as a tooltip when hovering over icons, especially with Show Titles unchecked, across all icon sets.
In the new “object edit menu”, it shows the picture associated with the selected object (it appears above “Created by you” and “Updated by you”). When there is no picture, you get a grey square box with the image of a grey camera inside the box.
My guess is for the vast majority of objects, there will be no picture associated with it (in my case, I have no pictures for any object in any map). In these majority of cases, this means there is wasted screen real estate in the object edit menu – and it actually takes up a lot of space here (out of roughly 300 pixels of height, the area for the empty picture is roughly 55 pixels high – that means the empty picture area takes up roughly 18% of the height of the entire menu — not counting all the empty white space to the right of the grey box that is also “wasted”).
I bring this up because as I look at the new object edit menu, it looks bigger than it needs to be, and the information looks “disjointed” (for lack of a better term). It is probably because of this unused space in the very middle of the menu. I find my eyes shifting to the top (with the title, and the buttons like “Point Info”) and then the bottom (with cancel/edit buttons and the creation/edit timestamps) with this empty space in the middle I ignore. It doesn’t seem to “flow” as my eyes have to skip that 18% of empty space in the middle. So it seems disjointed.
I would suggest finding either (a) a different place to put the grey box/camera representing “there is no picture” so it doesn’t take up so much real estate in the middle of the menu or (b) just simply don’t show it if there is no picture. With (b), removing it entirely means there is no way to add a picture from the main view, but this is alleviated by just pressing the Edit button, where you can see the grey box that you can click to add a picture. It seems the Edit screen is where you should be editing/adding pictures anyway – since you are “editing” the object. Being able to click the grey box to add a picture from the main menu without clicking “edit” seems counter-intuitive (“I didn’t click Edit, why is it letting me edit the pictures? I cannot edit anything else in this menu, why is just the picture editable?”).
In any event, my main issue is the large screen real estate being taken up in the middle of the menu by basically nothing (an empty “there is no picture associated with this object” image). It seems like that information could be visualized better without taking up so much room in the middle of the menu.
Sorry for the long winded post – wasn’t sure how to explain my thoughts without all the words 🙂
Changes… I guess we will get used to them.
One thing I noticed is that in the current map, when you hover over a trail/trail segment, it gives you on the top right the name of the trail/segment with the miles and kilometers of the same.
This behavior is even though I have selected miles as my distance unit. But I think it is very useful to see both when hovering. (I use kilometers daily but where I hike everything is in miles).
In the new map, it only show the miles. It would be nice to continue to have both, and I think it is a tiny thing to leave from the old format.
Thanks.
Two observations Bulk ops shows area in only acres which I like. When creating similar objects, the folder and other properties no longer carry over from one object to another. They must be entered for each object.
I take it that no one at CalTopo is old enough to have lived through the Y2K fiasco. Please stop using two digit abbreviations for the year in dates. And, for anyone not paying attention, NAD27 will not be the new datum next year.
With the new interface, how can I see the “Terrain Stats” for an object such as a line, polyglon, etc., as described at https://training.caltopo.com/all_users/objects/existing-lines#terrain
In the current interface, when I right-clock on a line, I see “Terrain Stats” as one option.