Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Meet Rever

I have been getting into adventure motorcycling. I bought myself a used Suzuki VStrom 650 right as the '15 season came to an end, and now I am planning for some trips next year. A coworker tipped me off to the Rever app--if Google Maps met Facebook and they had a child, it would be Rever. A very cool thing about Rever is that it is owned by the great folks at Butler Maps, makers of fine road and off-road back country Maps for motorcyclists--you'll see why that matters shortly.

When you think of Rever, think this way: you and some buddies want to ride somewhere fantastic together this summer. You're geographically dispersed, so you can't sit down face to face to discuss the route. Half the group want GPX tracks for the route, and the other half want to use a mobile device with offline capabilities. You want to build the trip easily, and you want some fantastic rides along the way. Rever does all that!
  • Rever is a social hub--invite your friends and make a group.
  • It features Google-quality street maps, with click-by-click route generation.
  • It exports GPX format, but can be used directly on a mobile device.
  • The mobile app tracks you on your route, with an offline map feature for remote rides.
  • Finally, it overlays Butler route info, so as you are planning you can see the best rides.
I'll blog some more on this later--for now, check out the screen grab from my Nexus 7 to get an idea of what a ride looks like. As you can see, its mobile app interface looks like a pretty standard Google Maps experience, with a few control bars above and below. What's awesome is, as a premium subscriber, you get access to Butler Maps route overlays. You can not only see standard map data, but any Butler rides are super-imposed (with the familiar Butler color codes). Very handy!

Currently route creation is a PC browser activity--the mobile app is used during travel. That may change, who knows. Building routes on any mobile device other than a 12" or larger tablet is a bit tedious, so it may not matter. Still, I am really looking forward to using Rever for my planning and traveling this season.

One nice feature in Rever is the ability to track your ride. This is a ride I planned, but it also tracked it and recorded it for me. This is good for going back and finding rides again later, for determining distance and such, and also participating in challenges (you have to check out the site to learn more about challenges - I gotta give you SOME reason to go there!).

Scoot on over to Rever.co (yes - that is http://rever.co and not .com), check out the features (and trust me - the Rever team is hard at work adding new features all the time) and sign up!

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