Last week I wrote about my efforts to try and work out a way to make Apple Maps more usable for riding my motorcycle. To do this I used a Numbers spreadsheet that took 15 GPS points and then created a hyperlink to Apple Maps allowing that route to be ridden.

Yesterday I got to prove that my method works and it worked really well. There was a little caveat I found but by the time that showed up it wasn’t an issue at all.

Just to recap. Apple Maps has a feature that allows you to create a route, save it for later, then follow that route whenever you want to. The problem is that this feature is designed entirely for walking and hiking. Kind of weird when you think of why Apple Maps exists right? I suspect this feature has more to do with testing and that ultimately it will come to driving as well. On the surface, routing isn’t really a driving thing... however, when it comes to motorcycling, planning a ride is a BIG thing.

So using Apple Maps routing is out of the question at least for the moment. We’re a couple of months away from WWDC so that might change. I did email Tim Cook but whether or not he read it is pretty much up for debate.

I hope we do get routing for vehicles, and I hope we can have more than 15 waypoints like we can using Apple Maps currently (still better than Google Maps’ 9 waypoints).

But you might remember I said there was a caveat to my method.

Each time you go through a waypoint it tells you you’ve reached your stop. You simply click “Next Route” and you carry on with your next waypoint. I have a CarPlay unit on my bike and that’s easy enough to do, even with gloves on. However, on my last waypoint I turned the bike off when I had a stop and when I turned the bike on it wanted to restart the route from the start. What I should have done is triggered the next waypoint then turned the bike off. Oh well, I’ll remember for next time.

The mere fact that I was able to plan a trip using a spreadsheet was kind of a fun exercise. The mere fact that Excel couldn’t do what I so easily did in Numbers and even Google Docs was interesting. I guess this proves I’m right about Numbers NOT being a lightweight spreadsheet. I mean, I’ve yet to find anything Excel does that Numbers doesn’t do… aside from being able to reference external spreadsheets.

I was right about Apple Maps being much better than Google Maps. The map makes way more sense than what Google Maps produced… at least if you’re a motorcyclist.

I was also right about how awesome that trip would be. Lots of dirt roads, some of which were seriously rough DOC tracks.

I was also right about there being complete morons on these roads as the video will attest to.