Getting around Radar

Radar was rebuilt around the phone. It is the same app on a computer, but on a phone and a tablet it now has proper navigation, a results sheet you can pull up over the map, and every control large enough to hit with a thumb.

Nothing here costs anything or needs an account.

The tabs along the bottom

On a phone or a tablet, five tabs sit across the bottom of the screen, where your thumb already is. They are always there, whatever you are doing.

• Map: the map and your search results. This is the home of the app.
• Search: opens the search panel over the map. See below.
• Saved: your saved places, grouped by category.
• Add: the form for adding a place to the community map.
• More: everything else.

The tab you are on is highlighted, so you always know where you are. Search is the one tab that is not a page: it acts on the map you are already looking at, so it opens a panel rather than taking you somewhere else. Press it from Saved or More and Radar goes back to the map first, then opens the panel.

This replaces the hamburger menu. Before, Settings took several taps to reach through a drawer, the Data sources page could not be reached from anywhere at all, and if you had not saved anything yet there was no way to open your saved places on a phone. Every page in Radar is now two taps away at most.

On a computer there are no bottom tabs. The header at the top of the screen already carries the same things, so a tab bar would only repeat them and take space from the map.

The More tab

More is a plain list of the pages that are not the map:

• Settings: units, appearance, and your vehicle profile.
• Premium: what Premium adds, and how to get it.
• Data sources: where every result comes from.
• Sign in, or your account when you are already signed in.

The version of Radar you are running is at the bottom of that list, which is the thing to quote if you ever report a problem.

The Search tab

Press Search and a panel slides up from the bottom holding two things: the box you type into, and how far around it to look. They are one question, so they now sit together. Type a postcode, a place name or a what3words address, press Search, and the panel closes as the map moves. Done closes it without searching.

The search box no longer floats over the map on a phone. It cost the top of the map permanently for something used a few times in a session, and on a narrow screen it was not wide enough to say what it accepted: at 360 pixels the field had room for about half of "Postcode, place name or ///what3words". Search is a tab now, and the map keeps the space.

Nothing changes on a computer, where the search box stays in the header alongside the radius.

The results sheet

On a phone, your results live in a sheet that slides up over the map. It has three heights, and tapping the handle at the top moves between them:

• Peek: the title bar alone, telling you how many places are nearby, with the map otherwise clear.
• Half: the map on top, the list below. This is the usual working position.
• Full: the list nearly full screen, for reading down a long set of results.

Peek used to be a fixed strip meant to hold the first result, and as the list changed shape that strip stopped matching it: you got one card whole and the next one sliced in half. It is now sized to its own title bar, so nothing is ever cut off. The count ("13 places nearby") is what tells you whether expanding is worth a tap.

You can drag the handle if you prefer, but you never have to: tapping does the same job, which matters if dragging is awkward for you.

The sheet is not there until you have searched. Before that there is nothing to put in it, and an empty strip across the bottom of the map is only lost map.

The map stays live underneath the whole time. You can pan and zoom it with the sheet open, and the sheet never covers the tabs, so you can always leave.

The map also knows where the sheet is. The zoom buttons, the round buttons at the bottom right, and the map credits all move up and down as the sheet does, so nothing important ends up hidden underneath it.

The map gets out of the way while you drag it

On a phone, the moment you put a finger on the map everything floating on it leaves: the pills at the top slide up, and the round buttons, the results sheet and the bottom tabs slide down. You get the map edge to edge while you are moving it, which is the thing you are actually looking at. Let go and it all comes back a moment later.

The results sheet only does this while it is collapsed. If you have deliberately opened it to read, a nudge of the map will not take it away and lose your place.

This is touch only, and phone and tablet only. On a computer the header is a real bar above the map rather than pills on it, so there is nothing to hide.

The map now runs the full height of the screen, with the tabs floating on it rather than a strip of page reserved underneath. That was visible as a white bar that stayed behind when everything else slid away.

The Filters button

Everything that narrows a search now lives behind one Filters button in the header:

• What do you want to do?, at the top, which sets the categories for you in one tap. See What do you want to do?.
• Categories, with a search box so you can find one by name instead of scrolling through 40-odd of them.
• Radius.
• Fits my vehicle only, which hides parking your van would not get into. This one reads your Premium vehicle dimensions, so it is shown locked without them.

The question sits above the full category list rather than instead of it. Answer it if you want the quick way in, ignore it and tick what you like if you already know exactly what you are after.

Nothing runs until you press Apply

The panel holds your changes and runs the search once, when you press Apply. Ticking six categories used to mean six separate searches, each of them a few seconds, so the app felt as though it was fighting you. Now you set everything up, press Apply, and wait once.

The button tells you what you have chosen before you commit to it, and you can back out without changing anything.

There is no data source list in here. Radar chooses which feeds answer a search for you, based on where you are looking. See Radar picks the data sources for you.

Choosing how far to look

The radius is a slider, with the distance you are on written beside it. It is in the header on a computer. On a phone it is in the Search panel, next to the box you type into, and in the Filters panel as well, so it is to hand whichever way you came to it.

It was a row of distance buttons for a while, and that turned out worse rather than better. The row is only as wide as the space it is given, it scrolls sideways with no visible scrollbar, and it starts on whatever you have selected, so somebody sitting on 20 miles saw 20, 30 and 60 and nothing to suggest the shorter distances existed at all. A slider spans its whole range whatever width it is in, so no distance can hide.

The distances are unchanged, and still fine at the near end where most searches happen: 0.5 miles up to 60, or the same range in kilometres if that is your unit. The slider steps between them rather than sliding smoothly, so you always land on one.

Smaller things you may notice

• Everything is bigger. Buttons, tabs, and list rows are sized to be hit accurately with a thumb rather than a mouse pointer.
• The map controls work in the dark. The zoom buttons and map credits used to stay light whatever look you were in, which left them glaring on the dark map. They now follow your light or dark setting.
• The search box no longer shouts. It used to force everything you typed into capitals, which suited a postcode and looked wrong for a place name or a what3words address. Radar now works out which you have typed and tidies it up itself.
• Reordering is by button, not by dragging. Moving a category group up or down in the filters, or in the results list, is done with Move up and Move down buttons. The old way was drag and drop, which never worked on a touch screen at all.
• Settings tabs scroll. On a narrow screen the last Settings tab used to sit off the edge with no way to reach it.
• Radar respects "reduce motion", so if you have asked your phone to cut down on animation, Radar does.
• The map fits round the notch. On phones with a rounded screen or a home bar, nothing is tucked underneath it any more.
• Searches and the map are quicker. Radar was fetching far more from its own copy of the map than any search could ever show, and drawing the London charging zones at a precision no screen can render, which was over a megabyte on every map load. Both are trimmed, and nothing is missing from the results as a result.
• Radar tries again before it gives up. A search that fails because our end briefly went away is now retried a couple of times, quietly, within about a second. If it still fails, the message says the fault is ours rather than telling you to check a postcode that was fine all along.
• You can see what you are typing. For a short while the search box was drawing your text in the same colour as its own background, so a postcode typed into it was invisible. Fixed.
• No more empty yellow bar. The fuel price strip above your account details used to leave its background behind on any search that found no filling stations, which is most searches.
• The filters fit on a computer. The category chips are sized for a thumb, which is right on a phone and wasteful with a mouse. They are now smaller when you are using a pointer, which saves a good deal of scrolling in a panel that holds every category. A tablet is still treated as a touch screen, however wide it is.
• The map stays behind the app. On the Saved places list and on the form for adding a place, the map could paint itself over the top of the bottom tabs and over the list itself. It looked broken, though the tabs still worked. Fixed.
• The roadworks and zone buttons read properly in the dark. Those two layer buttons kept their light-mode colours on a dark map. They now follow your light or dark setting like everything else.
• The signed-out notice is one line. It said you were signed out and then explained what that meant for your preferences, which was two lines of warning across the bottom of a phone. It now says you are signed out, with the Sign in link next to it.

On a tablet and a computer

Tablets held in portrait get the phone layout, which is what they should have had all along: at around 800 pixels wide Radar used to show the full desktop layout squeezed into a phone-shaped window, with card grids too narrow to read. Anything narrower than a laptop screen now gets the compact layout properly.

On a computer nothing about the way you work has changed. The results sit in a sidebar beside the map, the header carries search, filters, and your account, and the map fills the rest.

There are no bottom tabs on a computer, so every page there has a back arrow to the map. Settings, Premium, Data sources, and Saved places all lead back to where you started in one click, rather than leaving you to find your own way out.