Radar 5.8 Release

Summary

This release is mostly about FollowMe, and about one gap in it that mattered. A trip published a day or two behind protects you while you are driving and protects nothing once you have parked, so the route now also stops short of the van in distance. Alongside that, there is one link you can send to everybody rather than inviting people one address at a time, a way to show today's stop tonight instead of waiting out the clock, and a travelling name and photograph that is nothing to do with the name on your account.

We have also made it much clearer which features need a Nomad campervan, because Tracking and FollowMe are not things a Radar subscription can add.

The route now stops short of the van

Choosing to publish a trip a day behind sounds like enough, and while you are moving it is. Once you have stopped it is not: a car park you were in yesterday is the car park you are in today, so wait long enough and the delay quietly hands over your current spot while still looking as though it is working.

So there is a new setting when you start a trip, How close can they see, and it is set to 5 km unless you change it. Nothing within that distance of the van is published, however old it is and however anyone asks for it. Both rules apply and the tighter one wins.

It is not the same as How precise, which blurs each position but still says which car park. This one refuses to publish the last stretch at all.

There is an honest trade to know about. A line that stops short does tell somebody you have stopped somewhere inside that circle. That is a real thing to give away, and it is a much smaller one than the exact pitch.

One link you can send to everybody

Inviting twenty people one email address at a time is not something anybody does twice. So a trip can now have one link, which you send to a group chat, a family mailing list, or wherever your people are.

Anybody holding it can look, with no account. Asking somebody to sign up before they can see a photograph of a castle is friction with nothing behind it, and it is the same bargain location sharing already makes: the link is the key, and switching it off is your control.

Signing in is offered underneath the map as an upgrade rather than a toll gate. Somebody who signs in with a free Sensa account can save the trip, be told when there is something new, and appears to you by name so you can remove them on their own.

You keep three controls:

• Turn link off stops anybody new using it and leaves your existing followers alone. Turning it back on revives the same address, so it is a pause rather than a change.
• New link replaces the address, so the old one stops working for anybody who has not used it yet.
• Removing somebody sticks. A person you have taken off cannot get back in through the link, even though it is still going round. Their link simply stops working, and it does not tell them the trip is still there.

Inviting one person by email still works exactly as it did, and is still the way to hand somebody their own named place on the list.

Show today's stop tonight

Waiting out the clock is not always what you want. If you have just written about somewhere and you would like people to see it now, press Catch up to my latest post.

That moves the route forward to wherever your newest post is, so people see everything up to the thing you have just told them about. It is anchored on your post rather than on the time, which means it says "you may see up to where I told you about" and never "you may see where I am".

The distance setting above still applies, so pressing it from where you are parked will not hand over the pitch. Once something is visible it stays visible, so the route never goes backwards.

A travelling name, separate from your account

Until now a trip was published with no author at all, and the one place your name did appear was the invitation email, which used the name on your Sensa account.

You can now set a travelling name and a photograph for your trips, under How followers see you. Both are optional and either works on its own.

It is deliberately separate from your Sensa account and is never filled in from it. The name on your account is the name on your card, and the photo there was chosen for a settings page. A trip's link can travel further than the people you sent it to, and "Bertha and crew" is a perfectly reasonable thing to be out there instead.

You set it once for the household rather than once per trip, so changing your mind reaches every trip you have already published.

Which features need a Nomad van

Tracking and FollowMe are recorded by the Nomad system in the vehicle. They come with a Nomad van at no extra cost, and a Radar Premium subscription cannot add them, because a subscription with no van has nothing to record.

That was implied before and is now said plainly wherever they come up, so nobody subscribes expecting journey history. The full descriptions have moved to the Nomad documentation, alongside the switch in the cab that turns them on: Tracking and FollowMe.

Being on the receiving end still needs nothing at all. Opening a location share or a shared trip works with no account, and a free Sensa account is enough to keep either one.

Smaller things

• Saving a location share now lands on the right page. It used to drop you on a standalone list; it now takes you to the Saved shares tab in Settings, where the same list already lived. Both routes still work, and More, then Saved shares is unchanged.
• A share link survives a refresh. Opening a shared trip or an invitation and then reloading the page before signing in used to lose the link and report it as broken, when it was perfectly good.
• The "which did you mean?" list is readable on a phone. Searching from the bottom sheet put the list of matching places off the bottom of the screen, so a real search could answer with something you could neither read nor scroll.

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.