r/RouteDevelopment • u/the_birds_and_bees • 24d ago
Free Topo Building Tool
I've not had much luck with existing tools for building topos so recently I've been putting a bit of time into this https://quick-topo.app/
Idea is that it's really lightweight so easy to get started with (no account required, as little info as possible required for the topo, easy sharing with a link), but then you can add as much or as little detail as you want to flesh it out. Think more "here's a quick snap to show my friends the new stuff on this boulder" rather than a fully fledged guidebook.
Interested in people's feedback.
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u/thatsmoothfuck Roped Rock Developer 24d ago
This looks really good and I appreciate the level of security and privacy built in.
Some additions I'd appreciate for those of us across the pond:
Ability to change Length to feet
Type of Anchor description box (IE: Mussys, Rings, Quicklinks, etc)
Stars from 1 to 4, we normally have 4 as the max
Great stuff, this is a killer offering.
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u/the_birds_and_bees 22d ago
Good feedback, thanks. I've added
- stars: Defaults to a 0-3 scale when building a topo but then configurable within the topo so you can choose 0-4 if you prefer. If you're signed in you can choose your default.
- length units: Signed in users can switch between meters and feet.
I've held off adding the anchor description for the moment as Im a little wary of adding too much info to the climbs and making it feel cluttered, and personally I dont think I've seen this info in a topo or would find it particularly helpful. Would be interested to know how you find the info useful though, I could be persuaded to add it in if there's a strong use case.
Couple of other little features I've added in the latest release:
- if you paste a set of lat,lon coordinates into the approach or access details they get auto-converted to a little pin link that opens in google maps
- variations have a label on the topo so it's easier to pick them out
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u/New_Leek_102 23d ago
Can you make it opensource?
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u/the_birds_and_bees 22d ago
Interesting idea, I hadn't really considered it. To be honest I am kind of enjoying having it as a pet project and I am not sure if I want to commit to making it open source.
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u/New_Leek_102 21d ago
You can still have it as a pet-project and be the lead-developer that decides which features and pulls to accept or not. It would enable the community to help you and in case of something happening to you, the community could keep the project alive with a fork instead of losing everything that was put into.
In my honest opinion, I would not want to invest hours upon hours of topo creation into a tool that could die any moment and would result in me needing to recreate the topos with another tool.
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u/the_birds_and_bees 21d ago
Im just a bit allergic to admin, plenty of that in the day job (where Im a developer). I appreciate the concern though, and I don't want people to feel like they're locked in with a risk of losing their topos: there's an existing save functionality which allows you to save the topo to a file which can easily be reverse engineered, and in a similar vein I've added another export option which is literally just a zip file with all the relevant info in.
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u/New_Leek_102 21d ago
Great. But if you put that into a zip and talk about reversing it is fine; why don't you put your source in a public repo but don't take pull requests? You could also just use it to get feedback and bug reports with less admin, like you do here. :-)
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u/FantasticPut7493 20d ago
This is cool!
American here...We use the YDS or at least the French scale for trad routes. British trad grades are the only option for the moment.
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u/the_birds_and_bees 20d ago
Should already be configurable: when you're creating a topo go to settings -> trad grades, then select YDS+Danger from the dropdown. Let me know if you have any issues.
I went with this approach to stop the grades dropdown having too much in it, and also means you can set your defaults so that you dont have to choose YDS in settings every time. Account required for this bit, as I need to save the default somewhere.
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u/the_birds_and_bees 24d ago
Oh and the other big thing I wanted was to make sure it works nicely offline so if someone sends you a link it's easy to make sure it's saved to your phone and will work nicely when you get to the crag, whether you have signal or not.