Introducing Thumbnail Maps with Terrain plus Full Screen Google Maps

Good news to report on maps this week.  We’re continuing to work on them and just rolled out a couple of big improvements.

Better Thumbnail Maps
We’ve been reading all of the feedback in the New Maps discussion board and agree with many of the criticisms of the new thumbnails on the dashboard and profile pages.  As heavy users of the product, we look at these pages all day long and have been noticing the same things you have.  We’ve been working closely with MapBox and have some progress to report:

• We’re now using terrain maps, a new feature from MapBox.  Check out the screenshot below and see what a difference terrain makes.
• We’ve been playing with color saturation to try to increase the contrast of the shadowing which we felt was too subtle.  We’ll keep making adjustments here.
• Labels – this is a gap that we’re continuing to work on with MapBox.  There simply aren’t enough labels in the thumbnails right now.  MapBox is working hard to make improvements to labels and we’ll keep you posted on this one.

Full Screen/Full Browser Google Maps
Thanks to an Innovation Days project (think Strava hackathon), you can now launch REALLY BIG GOOGLE MAPS on run/ride pages by using the fullscreen icon at the top right of the map. In Chrome and Firefox, fullscreen mode takes up your entire monitor display.  In Safari and Internet Explorer it will take up your entire browser display.

In addition to being able to explore activities in great detail with the fullscreen map, you can easily interact with the route using the elevation profile.  For more tips on using fullscreen mode, check out this support article.

Take a look and let us know what you think.

Thanks,
Alex Mather & the Design Team