Radar 5.4 Release

Summary

The phone map gets its screen back. Search moves off the map and into its own tab, everything floating over the map steps aside while you drag it, and the map now runs the full height of the screen. Radar also stops asking you to choose data sources and chooses them for you.

Search is a tab now

On a phone and a tablet there is a fifth tab along the bottom: Search. Press it and a panel slides up holding the box you type into and how far around it to look, together. Type a postcode, a place name or a what3words address, press Search, and the panel closes as the map moves.

The search box no longer floats over the map. It sat there 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, and the map keeps the space.

The radius comes with it. It was tucked inside the Filters panel, three taps away from a search, which is why the two drifted apart: people searched at whatever distance they last left. It is one question, so it is now in one place. It is still in Filters as well, and it is unchanged in the header on a computer.

Press Search from Saved or More and Radar goes back to the map first, then opens the panel, so you are never searching a map you cannot see.

The map gets out of the way

Put a finger on the map and 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. 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.

The map also runs the full height of the screen now, with the tabs floating on it rather than a strip of page held back underneath them. That strip was visible as a pale bar left behind when everything else slid away.

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

The results sheet, tidied

The collapsed Peek height was a fixed strip meant to hold the first result. The list stopped being that shape some time ago, so what you actually got was one card whole and the next one sliced in half. Peek is now sized to its own title bar, which cannot be cut off by content it does not contain, and it carries the count: "13 places nearby" is what tells you whether pulling it up is worth a tap.

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

Search this area moved to your thumb

Search this area, the pill offering to run the same search where you are now looking, sat across the top of the map. On a phone it now sits near the bottom instead, just above the results sheet, because it appears in response to a pan and the hand that just panned is already down there. It moves up and down as the sheet does, so it is never buried underneath it.

On a computer it is unchanged: across the top, dropping to the bottom when the route planning card is in the way.

Radar picks the data sources for you

There is no longer a list of data sources to tick and untick. Which feeds answer a search was never a fair question to ask: you would have to know that France's national aires database matters in Normandy and does nothing in Kent, and every wrong guess showed up as a thinner map with nothing to explain why.

Radar knows which sources cover where you are looking and uses them. Results from all of them are merged, so the same filling station never appears twice.

Nothing is hidden as a result. The full list, with the licence and attribution for each, is on the Data sources page under More, and once results are on screen you can still see which source any particular place came from, both in its details and in the results list.

Bigger layer buttons in the van

On the Radar screen in a Nomad van, the layer control is now a grid of large square tiles, three to a row, rather than a list of rows with switches. The whole tile is the switch, so there is nothing small to aim at, and the tiles are well spaced: in a moving vehicle a mis-hit turns off the wrong layer, and noticing that costs you a second glance at a screen you should barely be looking at.

Nine layers come down to three rows, so the sheet covers about a third of the map card instead of all of it.

Smaller things

• 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 bottom tabs and over the list. It looked broken, though the tabs still worked.
• The roadworks and zone buttons read properly in the dark. Those two kept their light colours on a dark map.
• The signed-out notice is one line. It said you were signed out and then explained what that meant, which was two lines of warning across the bottom of a phone. It now says you are signed out, with the Sign in link beside it.

Still to come

Route planning still covers Great Britain only, on both plans. Places in Germany or Norway do not mean directions there.

The five other English Clean Air Zones and Oxford's zero emission zone are still not on the map. There is no single national feed for them, so each is its own piece of work, and an area with no zone drawn on it is not a guarantee there is no scheme there.

Offline map packs remain a planned Premium feature and will arrive with the native mobile app. They are not available yet on any platform.