Route color

Beta 5.24 has this change:

- Added the ability to customize the activity track color on the map

Initially I though this would allow us to change navigation color, but unfortunately doesn't seem to be so. I wasn't able to figure out which color can now be customized additionally. Anyone know what it does?

The Garmin's Magenta routing color is useless in the real world riding. When you have sunglasses on magenta will look like brown, red and every other color in the map. That means you can't discern the route from the normal surrounding roads.

The Wahoo's chevrons is the superior way of displaying a route.

Hello. I have exactly the same problem. It was so nice with the 705. Yellow map and route in magenta. Now we have a lots of colors on the map, like woods in green...useless.

I have the same problem. Especially when following a track with the routing function aka "ride the course", the guidance text is not reliable so I have to keep my eye on the map. Especially when there is a crossing with red colored roads, it is impossible to see, where should I go, the magenta line cant be distinguished from the other roads!
This happens often, when the light is not optimal or when I wear sunglass or the wiev angle is not optimal etc.

The solution is not necessarily a different colour: the line showing the way while routing could be thicker, have a different shape, different style. Important: it must be really different, and Garmin should test visibility also with red coloured roads and sunglasses etc.

Also the routes (courses) when shown on the map - no navigation - are too thin and not really visible, this should be thicker or the user should be able to change it to be thicker!

Hey Garmin, this is not a minor cosmetic issue, this relates to the basic function otf the device. showing the way! Even much cheaper devices can do this much better, so please solve this asap!

Yes, this is a critical issue for me. While the map is probably fine when taking screenshots (see the product image on the box) or designing the map theme on a desktop display at Garmin HQ, it's really, really impractical during actual usage on a subpar, de-saturated Edge display, viewed through sun glasses  - I'm not criticizing the Edge display since it obviously has to consider battery life of the unit. However the map and routing information should be designed in a way that takes those limitations into account.

Garmin should reduce the number of colors used in maps - stick to mostly monochrome themes and use color very sparingly to highlight important content, like major roads. They should use line pattern and border variations to distinguish between different road/path types. Colors like gray, red, black, magenta or purple are simply very hard to distinguish while riding 30-40 km/h. If it wasn't for the white turn by turn arrow I'd be completely lost in countless situations.

This is something that makes me consider going back to the Wahoo Roam - it certainly has other problems and probably isn't worth the premium price tag but the visibility/clarity of the map and the route I'm navigating is crucial to me. Wahoo nails this. Garmin needs to improve urgently in this regard.

• Yes I totally agree. Which is why I sent my 530 back for a refund. The lines are far too thin. Went back to my Edge 800 which is 10 years old but the lines and the position triangle seem a lot wider and very easy to see on the move.

Further thinking about the map and its visibility and readability, I'd actually have another feature suggestion: A map editor.

While I prefer the mostly monochrome look with sparsely colored highlights found on Wahoo's Elemnt Roam, I'm sure other users have other preferences. To accomodate all of them a simple map editor that allows to create and share map styles between Garmin Edge devices would be perfect.

That map editor could be a very simple deskop, web or mobile app that allows the user to set attributes like background color, border color, line color, line patterns etc. for the most common road/path types as well as terrain like fields, forests, water and structures. Soemthing like a stylesheet creator for maps.

Users could share their work and discover other people's creations on the Connect IQ store.

Learn how to create your own maps from OSM data and then you can specify the look yourself.  I do this as I have my preferred colour scheme which is different from Garmin's.

OSM data can be downloaded from Geofabrik.  Use OSMconvert to convert to o5m format for processing. You will probably want to strip out unnecessary data from it OSMfilter.  Use mkgmap (and the associated splitter tool) to create the maps.  You define how the map features map to line types/area types in mkgmap.  You can find tools to customise those styles and create a typ file which defines the map look.

I then instal the maps in Garmin's Basecamp and then transfer to my device.

Practice with a small area (as it is quicker) while working out your preferred map look.

While I probably could get all these steps done as I have a technical background as a developer I'm not sure I'd want to go to these lengths and I'm absolutely certain most regular users won't or can't.

That's why I suggested a simple WYSIWYG kind of map editor that generates a stylesheet - really doesn't have to be more complicated than the object properties section of a vector / illustration tool like Sketch (https://www.sketch.com/) - layers (e.g. roads, terrain, etc.) on one side, visual attributes on the other side and a large preview of those changes in the middle.

Ideally that would require to separate the raw map date from the styling information (as in a lightweight stylesheet) in order to be able to swithc between styles on the fly. It's my understanding that currently Garmin's styles are embedded into the map data.