We are excited to announce a significant milestone for us, the 2.0 release of ridewithgps.com.

Here is a brief overview of the changes:

• The route planner and viewer has been rewritten from the ground up, and no longer uses Flash.
• All uploaded file processing has been rewritten, resulting in more comprehensive support for the many variations of GPX and other file types.
• New base layer options in the maps, including OSM maps and several topo maps (available in the top right of the map).
• Entire site internationalized. This means we will be able to translate the site into other languages, and localize dates.
• We touched everything and are in a much better position moving forward.
• During this process we also expanded our server infrastructure. We have redundancy everywhere, room for lots of growth, and moving forward plan to be rock-solid stable and faster than ever.
• The format and storage backend for all route and GPS data has completely changed to be faster and better suited for significant growth.

The release process was fairly complex, and a bit bumpy. We stayed up all night Thursday night trying to get non-latin characters displaying correctly, and fixed a number of bugs Friday and today. Our new route planner is a bit slow in IE 7 and 8, and to those users we highly recommend the Google Chrome Frame, an easy-to-install addon that uses the fantastic Chrome engine inside of IE. This means you don't have to switch away from IE to a different browser, and you get the primary benefits of using Google Chrome. This will speed up all of your web browsing if you are an IE user - especially viewing and planning routes on our site. That being said, performance is one of our foremost concerns. We want our site to be as fast as possible, so we will continue improving performance in the new planner.

To all the users who have contacted us over the past few days, with frustrations, congratulations, and bug reports: thank you! Your feedback has been invaluable.

If you have any feedback for us - feature ideas, bugs, or just want to chat - don't hesitate to get in touch. You can reach us at info@ridewithgps.com or by clicking the Feedback link on ridewithgps.com.