MapMyRide

I'm very impressed with MapMyRide.com. For starters, I obviously like the fact it's free as I'm a cheapskate but that's not the be all and end all. I've used a few different free GPS course creators and MapMyRide.com seems far and away the best. The map coverage is very good of the area I live in and contains most of the fiddly little roads I like to cycle on but not every map shows. As you can imagine, that's a real pain with a lot of them. I would be plotting routes out for my GPS unit and find they kind of disappeared part of the way through and I had to guess where some roads were. It didn't make for accurate mapping.

Something else I really really really like about MapMyRide.com is the ability to set it to follow the roads between points. I'm probably not explaining this well but basically it means I can put down a two consecutive points along a road and the software is smart enough to draw the squiggly line in between, along which the path of the road actually goes. In the past, I found myself having to draw dozens and dozens of points to follow the shape of the road but thankfully that's a thing of the past. I can even put points a couple of roads apart and MapMyRide.com seems smart enough to usually grasp the way I want to go. This means it takes, I estimate, less than a quarter of the time it used to for me to map out cycle routes. It's also more enjoyable than merely 'clicking' hundreds of waypoints down. Hopefully it will save me from all the 'Off route' messages I kept getting with my self-done waypoints, especially once I got lazy and bored towards the end of a route.

Another bonus worthy of mention is that MapMyRide.com lets one export a copy of the route as a 'CRS' file. As I've got a Garmin Edge GPS unit, that's very handy. The software (Called 'Training Center') their Edge units use doesn't work well with a number of standard GPS formats ('GPX' files, for example). You can get it to work but it means downloading other software to convert the files over so Training Centre understands it. Thankfully, with MapMyRide.com, this is not a problem. It exports the files in a manner Training Centre and my Edge both understand. I know this doesn't sound like much but it makes things so much easier than pissing about with different file types and attempting (Often failing through my ineptitude) to convert them. By the way, if you do need to convert files for your GPS unit, I recommend looking at this topic here, even if it gets a bit much and might send you to sleep. You can probably find most of what you want to know if the first couple of posts.

Anyway, another little mention MapMyRide.com deserves is for letting you print out a list of the directions on the route you've created. This is marvellous. I used to spend ages writing out big lists of 'TL at TJ, SO at XR etc. etc' and now I shouldn't have to as MapMyRide.com automatically does that when you 'map your ride'. How wonderful! The two pains in the arse for me in devising a route have been covered by MapMyRide.com. No longer will I have to clickety-clickety-click a little series of waypoints vaguely following the contours of a road and no longer will I waste time away writing directions for the cycle I'm planning on. What a super piece of free software it is. I hope it continues to be free and as good as it seems.