Tools for mapping cycle routes

Over the weekend I've experimented with both Toporoute and Sanoodi to map routes and create elevation profiles for a cycle event I organise. I've done a bit of Google Maps stuff myself so I appreciate that what these systems are doing isn't trivial, and that it is difficult to make these things make enough money to sustain themselves; it isn't fair to criticise too harshly.

Toporoute: what I liked

Road following is a great feature. I was surprised how good the road following was, too. There were two downsides to this. First, my route uses some cycle paths which are not known to Google's route database. Toporoute wasn't able to find these. It would be nice to be able to create a route which is partly road following and partly waypoint to waypoint. Secondly, Toporoute did not play at all nicely with Linux, my normal operating system. Both Firefox and Konqueror froze when trying to pan or scale maps with more than moderately complex routes.

The other thing I very much liked about Toporoute was the use of screen real estate. The map uses as much as possible of the browser area and resizes with the browser. This really helps.

Toporoute: what I didn't like

Apart from the cross-platform issue, Toporoute did what it did very well. However, I felt that it would have benefited from user login and profile features such as those Sanoodi has.

It wasn't possible to give routes meaningful names. Instead, they got randomly generated character strings which were not memorable.

I was not able to save my whole route as a single route, because it was too large. So I had to divide it into route segments. In practice this meant I had to replot each segment.

I couldn't make the 'undo' function work; if I went wrong while setting out a route I found it was easier to start again from scratch.

Sanoodi: what I liked

What I appreciated about Sanoodi was the potential community building features. The user has a login; maps created by that user are associated with the login. It's possible to set up 'friends' (although I didn't see any way to search for friends, e.g. by location or by email address). The integration with Flikr was interesting, and, at least for me, retrieved relevant photographs.

I also liked being able to set my 'home' location, so that, when planning a new route, I don't have to start in the middle of the USA and then pan all the way over to Scotland before I can start work!

Sanoodi: what I didn't like

My biggest criticism of Sanoodi is the very restricted map display. On my screen the map display takes up about one sixth of the available browser canvas, and this is made more aggravating by the fact that there are wide empty margins down both sides. I'd like to see the top navigation panel very much reduced in size, perhaps by putting the logo to left or right of the main navigation, by putting the right hand feature box to the extreme right of the screen, and having the map expand dynamically to fill the remaining real estate.

The elevation profile display is also very small, and does not zoom.

Some features did not work cross-platform. For example, I wasn't able to upload a photo from Linux. Some features seemed not to work at all - I failed to upload a GPX file from any platform.

Features missing from both systems

One thing that would be very useful indeed would be to be able to label waypoints with meaningful names, and have these shown on the elevation profile.

Overall

The look-and-feel of Sanoodi is much more polished, and Sanoodi has a lot of subsidiary features which add greatly to the overall utility of the system. But for the core function, route planning and display, and in particular for elevation mapping, Toporoute is much better.