New app from Memory-Map

A new year. On the last day of the old one, I made a string of Caravan Club site bookings - my long late-spring tour that will take me to Scotland and back. And as an encore, I bought Memory-Map's 2024 All-Great Britain Ordnance Survey map package. 

It cost me £149.98. But for that, I got all of Great Britain at various scales. The ones I was chiefly interested in were the 1:50,000 and 1:25,000 scales, but I was glad to get the OS street mapping, and also chucked in free were the 1:250,000 road atlas, and the 1:1,000,000 map (good for route planning). All this represents a fantastic bargain compared to the total cost of buying the OS's own paper maps individually. 

A few days later, and after reading online reviews about it, I have installed the new Memory-Map For All app on my phone. I say 'new', but this app was launched in beta form back in 2022. It has now had its initial issues dealt with, and is there to use, fully formed as it were. It's free. (The maps it shows aren't, of course: mostly, they need to be bought) The 'for all' part of the name means that this app can be installed on a device running any platform - Apple, Android, Windows, whatever - and look and operate exactly the same. It can do this because once the user has paid for the mapping, and activated it after logging on, it downloads to storage within the app, and not in an ordinary system folder. I'm guessing that avoids the particular limitations imposed by each platform's architecture and security restrictions. Bottom line: viewing the maps is as slick as before, perhaps even more so; and Memory-Map have been able to entirely redesign the old app and add many new things to it, chiefly in the on-the-ground navigation department. So it's nirvana for walkers. 

Me, I do walk, but not so very far. Let's say I can cover 15,000 steps on undemanding terrain before my right leg starts to ache a bit. I am never now going to traverse mountain ridges in high hill country, so I don't need the mapping tools to get me up there and back again. But I do need to devise days out in Sophie; and when I get out of the car, I want to find my way around towns and villages, and locate obscure places to photograph. 

So I use OS maps a lot. I use them daily. And Memory-Map make it possible for me to view them super-conveniently on my phone. And I must say, I really like their new app. 

So what do I see on the phone screen? 

There are little control tabs at each corner, and on each long side. These (for instance) bring up different maps, fire up GPS, put markers on the map, or enable the user to plan a route with things such as altitude and distance being recorded. I use coloured flags to pinpoint Club sites, and coloured g-pins to pinpoint places I want to photograph, and other things.

You can leave these tabs showing all the time, or make them disappear after a few seconds. I set them to vanish after three seconds. But I can have them back just by touching the screen. 

As for the maps, they are all High Definition raster, and do not get blurry as you zoom in. In this screen sequence I am zooming in on Dornoch in northern Scotland, the scale changing automatically as I do so:

The OS street plan just above is a bit bare-bones, but perfectly good enough for walking around a place and finding its major features. But if looking for a particular shop, pub, restaurant or museum, I would fire up Google Maps as well.

There were other maps in the 2024 package, but these are the ones I want for my own day-to-day usage.

The phone is normally held in the 'portrait' position, but sometimes it's nice to turn it through 90 degrees and have a 'landscape' view. The old Memory-Map app wouldn't let you do that with the maps - they could only be viewed in 'portrait' style. Now there's a 'landscape' view as well. So (for instance) instead of having only this view of Holy Island on the Northumberland coast...

...you can now have this:

Or indeed this:

It makes east-west route planning so much easier. Thus a big chunk of South West England in one glance, without scrolling:

I'm delighted. 

A word of caution, though. It is possible to download all the maps in their entirety, but it would tie up your phone for a long time, as the full download at those scales would consume many gigabytes of storage. The practical alternative is to download mapping only as it is needed. Each map scale downloads automatically in screen-sized chunks, taking only a couple of seconds each time. This gradual process keeps the load on the phone's memory small. In any case, it's pointless to install the entire 1:25,000 or 1:50,000 map if only ever viewing a few selected local areas. I can personally claim some justification for downloading at least a few gigabytes. I do travel around a lot, to most parts of the country. 

Watching the map fill in and become crisp is so fascinating. It's all too easy to scroll north, south, east or west, and reveal yet more and more, until whole swathes of the country can be seen. And those OS maps are beautiful. It becomes compulsive. If your phone has oodles of storage available, and there's nothing else to get on with, you can end up doing this for an hour or more. But then, you've paid for it. So why not?