Radar 5.6 Release

Summary

Two big things. FollowMe lets you publish a trip to the people you invite while you are still on it, a few days behind, with your notes and photos pinned along the route. And Trip mode now turns the map to face the way you are going, so it reads like the sat-nav you are used to. There is also a share button for the map you are looking at, and location shares can be kept rather than re-entered.

FollowMe: let people follow the trip as you make it

If you have a Nomad van with Tracking switched on, you can now name a journey and invite people to follow it. They get a map of where you have been, building up as you go, with your notes and photos pinned where they happened.

It is deliberately behind. You choose one, two, three, or seven days, and there is no live option, because publishing where the van is right now to a standing audience is a much bigger thing than showing one person for an afternoon. Nobody following can tell whether the vehicle is sitting somewhere unattended today.

You can also choose how precise the route is, and you can hide the area around home. The published route stops short of it and starts again on the other side, rather than drawing a straight line across your street.

Journeys live in the mySensa portal, under Control, then Tracking, then FollowMe. You invite somebody by email, and they get a link that works once: they sign in with a Sensa account, and from then on only that account can follow. So a forwarded invitation is worth a single use, you can see by name who took it, and you can remove anybody at any time.

Someone follows one journey, not your van. Letting a neighbour watch your fortnight in France does not hand them every drive you have made since you bought it.

Notes and photos, pinned where they happened

On the journey in mySensa there is a box saying What is happening here?. Type, add up to ten photos, and post. It pins where you are at the time, or on the van's own track if your phone cannot say, and posts wait for the same delay as the route so nothing sneaks out ahead of it.

Your followers can turn on an email when there is something new. It says only the name of the journey and that there is something new: no position, no place name, not a word of the post, because everything else is behind their own sign-in and an inbox is not.

New page in the docs: FollowMe.

Trip mode faces the way you are going

Press Start and the map now turns so that what is ahead of you is at the top of the screen. A left turn on the screen is a left turn through the windscreen, with nothing to work out in your head.

Alongside it:

• The map zooms in to a driving level, so a route you planned zoomed right out does not stay zoomed out for the whole drive.
• Your vehicle glides between position updates rather than jumping once a second.
• Radar asks your phone to keep the screen on, so a phone on the dash does not go dark between turns.
• The route card shrinks once you are moving, and on a phone folds to a thin strip, with everything else tucked behind Route details. Nothing is taken away.

There is one trade while the map is turned: it is held still to keep it pointing the right way, so you cannot pan or zoom. Tap the compass at the top right for north at the top and normal panning, and tap it again to go back.

This first version has not been driven end to end on a phone with real GPS on the road, so try it on a route you already know rather than leaning on it somewhere unfamiliar.

Send someone the map you are looking at

Share this view hands out a link that reopens Radar exactly where you are: the same spot, the same distance around it, the same categories ticked. Post "the aires near Calais" in a forum, or send the campsites you have just found to whoever is driving.

It is the round share button on the map, and on a computer it also sits in the header next to Saved. On a phone it opens your usual sharing options; on a computer it copies the link.

Keep a location share instead of retyping the code

Opening a shared location still needs no account and never will. What was tedious was the second look, hunting back through old messages for a six-digit code.

Now, once the map is on screen, the page offers to save it. Saving needs a Sensa account, which is free, and after that the vehicle appears under More, then Saved shares, and as a pin on your own map.

For the person who sent the link, each of your live links now names who has saved it, with a Remove beside each one, so you can stop one person without stopping everybody. We email you the first time somebody saves one, because somebody keeping hold of where your vehicle is is worth knowing about.

Where the map opens

With nothing better to go on, Radar now has one quiet go at using your device's location, so it starts near you rather than in London. There is no prompt beyond your browser's own, and nothing is said if it does not work.

A shared link still wins, and coming back to Radar still picks up where you left off. Inside a Nomad van it is skipped, because the vehicle's own screen decides where the map should be.

The map can also no longer get stuck in the ocean. A remembered position that had gone bad could leave Radar sitting off the coast of west Africa and put itself back every time a card opened. Radar now checks a remembered position is a real one first.

Smaller things

There is a limit on how many routes can be worked out for one signed-out visitor in a minute. It is set well above what planning a journey takes, including dragging the ends around and watching the route redraw, so ordinary use will not meet it. Signing in lifts it.

Still to come

FollowMe and Tracking are built but have not yet been released to vans in the field.

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