NZ Topo50 South Island 4+

Great app

I used Gaia GPS for my 24-week through-hike of Te Araroa. It worked fine, but required downloads of individual maps and was very complex.

In comparison, this app has fewer features and is therefore much simpler to use. It also includes a map for the whole island, with the ability to turn on/off locations of trails, DoC huts, hunting areas, etc. I’ve found it to be almost perfect for Great Walks and other multi-day tramps.

One minor annoyance is that it is hard to click on some features - such as huts, to see the hut names - without instead hitting other features such as the neighbouring trail.

New update difficulties

This is a great app. But some features in the update make it more difficult to use. The new marker discs which replace the flags obscure the small features which make route planning or even micro navigation to reach that specific location more difficult. The grid reference feature requires you move the curser to read the location data. Something which makes it extremely difficult to find specific locations and note them down. It still also gives the grid reference backwards which may cause some real user problems. The distance and bearing feature obscures the possible direction of travel and makes it challenging to read the fine detail of the map around where you are. The improved map detail is mean though.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for the feedback. I'll be adding controls for the icon size as they are probably a bit large at the moment, and will add the skinny flag icon option back in - a few people seem to miss this. I'll add an option to keep the grid reference displayed permanently as well - although you can currently hold you finger on it to keep it displayed. The distance display does indeed occupy some of the central screen area but note that it can be turned off from the settings page. You are correct about the convention to report eastings first - I'll swap them around. Regards.

Fast and accurate

I really like this app. I use GPS professionally for logging vegetation points and this app is faster and almost as accurate as a dedicated GPS. The only thing it doesn’t do is average a location. It would be nice if the font size could be changed for those with failing eyesight, and if multiple waypoints could be deleted at once. Loading points is very easy but sending multiple points and drawn boundaries is problematic.