Write to us and we can write back. The feedback form now asks for your email address. It used to be optional, and what arrived was often a pocketful of random characters from a form somebody opened by accident — impossible to answer, and impossible to tell apart from a real report from someone who deserved a reply. Every message that reaches us is read by a person. Now they can answer you. Also fixed: the skyway lines had faint white nicks cut across them, at the junctions where a bridge meets the corridor it joins. Nothing was wrong with the skyway — the map was drawing the white outline of one line over the top of another, and on a map whose only job is telling you where you can walk, an accidental gap is the worst thing it can say. The paths draw as one continuous run now. And SkyMap can now tell you when it's out of date. If a version turns out to have a problem, the app will say so and point you at the update instead of leaving you walking around with it. It checks quietly, it never nags twice about the same release, and if you're deep in a building with no signal it says nothing at all and gets out of the way.

Parking prompts are gone. SkyMap used to notice when you parked in a ramp and ask whether it should remember the spot. It shouldn't have — that isn't what this app is for, and worse, the question wouldn't take no for an answer. Tapping "Not now" put it away until the next time the app came back, and the little button offering to walk you back to your car redrew itself on every launch with nothing on screen that could dismiss it. For anyone who had parked downtown, that left a panel sitting over the map for good. The whole feature is removed: the prompt, the button, and the part that watched your position to work out which ramp you were standing in. If SkyMap had already saved a ramp for you, this release clears it — you don't need to delete and reinstall the app. The ramps themselves stay exactly where they are. Everything added last release, including the three hand-curated ones, is still searchable and still routable. SkyMap will take you to a ramp; it just won't ask you about your car.

The ramps SkyMap never had. A reader wrote in to say they could never get the Hennepin @ 10th ramp to show up. They were right, and the reason turned out to be bigger than one ramp: SkyMap only ever knew about a parking ramp if OpenStreetMap had written a name on it. Ramps are the one thing downtown that almost never gets named — 27 of the 50 parking structures inside our map area carry no name at all, so not one of them had ever reached the app. The ramp a driver knows by name is exactly the one the map was least likely to have. Hennepin at 10th was worse still. It isn't in OpenStreetMap at all, and it has no county parcel under its address either. So it's in by hand now, from the city's own parking directory and the operator's facility page, along with LaSalle at 10th and 11th Street Underground. Every ramp we add this way has to say which building it reaches by skyway, checked against two sources, because a ramp you can find and then can't walk out of is a worse answer than one that's missing. What you won't see is a shape drawn around them. Nobody has surveyed these outlines, and inventing a plausible rectangle would look exactly like a real one — so they sit on the map as a name where they stand, and route from there. Save My Ramp got a related fix. It only offered to remember where you parked if the ramp was on the main skyway network, which quietly ruled out four real downtown ramps — including some of the ones with the longest walk to a skyway door, which are precisely the ones worth remembering. Thanks again to the readers writing in. Three releases running now where one email found something worth fixing.

Place names you can actually read. A reader wrote in to say the food places on the map took several passes to make out — and they were right in a way we could measure. Restaurant names were drawn in the same amber as the route line, which against the map behind them is about half the contrast text that size needs. Every name on the map is now drawn in ink instead. Colour still tells you what a place is, but it does it on the pin, where it's a filled shape with a symbol in it rather than ten-point letters. Fixing that made a second problem obvious: in the busiest blocks the names were piling on top of each other and on top of the pins. Downtown has buildings with half a dozen places inside, and a name like Savouré Vietnamese Eatery was wrapping to three lines across its neighbours. Names are now placed around the pins instead of over them, and they'll shift above, below or beside a pin to find room. The result is a map with more names on it than before, not fewer — a few places that never had room for a label now have one. When a block still can't fit every name, the choice of which one stays is no longer arbitrary. Places whose opening hours we've checked come first. Thanks again to the readers writing in. That's two releases running where a single email found something worth fixing.

Hundreds of places you couldn't find before. Downtown's skyway-connected hotels — the Marriott City Center, the Westin, the Hilton, the Royal Sonesta and ten more — were in SkyMap all along: searchable, routable, connected. They just had no pin. Turn on Hotels and they were the one kind of place that didn't appear, which is a strange way to find out your hotel is in the app. They have pins now, along with HCMC's Orange, Purple and Red buildings, City Hall, the federal courthouse and Westminster Presbyterian. Then a reader wrote in about a coffee shop in a hotel lobby we didn't have — and that one report turned up about a hundred more. Murray's, Cowboy Jack's, Monte Carlo, Gluek's, J.D. Hoyt's, Graze Food Hall, the Guthrie, Orchestra Hall, the Mill City Museum and dozens of others were all sitting in the map as unlabelled shapes. They're places again: searchable, filterable, on the map where they belong. We also went looking for what nobody had written down anywhere. Spyhouse Coffee at the Emery, Socca and Mara at the Four Seasons, Aurora at the Marriott, Bep Eatery, 123 Sushi and Sushi Takatsu are all in SkyMap for the first time, each one checked against two sources. And a few places that closed have been taken off the map, while four we'd marked as gone turned out to be very much open — so they stayed. Thanks to the readers who wrote in. Both reports found a whole class of missing places, not just one.

Your position no longer slides backwards. Walking a route, the dot could drift back down the line you'd already walked — the app allowed a step backwards on every reading, and a patch of bad indoor reception spent that allowance over and over. It now measures how far back you can go from the furthest point you've reached, so a bad reading can't march you back past a corner you've already turned. Routes are also honest about walking through buildings now. Where a building's interior isn't mapped, the walk across it used to count as no distance at all, so arrival times came out optimistic. That stretch is now estimated from the buildings that are mapped — expect times to read a little longer, and to be right. The last stretch of a route follows the corridor into your destination, instead of drawing a straight line through the walls to the middle of the building. And your position dot no longer sits on top of a building's name, hiding the label it's standing on.

Your position stays on the skyway. Walking a route indoors, the blue dot could suddenly jump into the street a block away — GPS can't tell that you're a floor above the road, and the app took its worst reading at face value. It now tracks how far along your route you've walked and only ever moves you as far as walking allows, so a bad reading nudges you instead of teleporting you. If you do leave your route, SkyMap says so and holds your last known spot rather than quietly guessing. Also fixed: the turn instruction at the top of the screen now follows light and dark mode properly, and its second line is readable again.

Fresher places, and hours that stay right. • Fifteen more places on the map, including Five Guys, Giulia, Champa Cafe, Lonely's Bar and the Portland Avenue Ramp — with six that have closed now removed. • More opening hours say which days a place is actually shut, rather than leaving you to assume it keeps the same schedule all week. • When a business publishes its own hours, those now win everywhere in the app. A restaurant saying it closes at 6:30 is no longer overruled by a map edit claiming 7:00 — being told a place is open when it isn't costs you the walk.

Hours you can trust — and honesty about the ones we don't have. • Opening hours for 113 more restaurants, shops and services, every one of them read off the operator's own website, menu or door — never a directory listing. • Buildings no longer borrow the city's generic skyway schedule. Most downtown buildings don't actually keep those hours, and showing them meant some buildings looked open four hours longer than they are, and open on weekends they're shut. Where nobody publishes hours, the app now says nothing at all instead of guessing. • Directions no longer avoid a building because of hours that were never about walking through it — a museum's ticket times and a food hall's kitchen hours don't decide whether the skyway is open. • Routes are smarter about the walk inside each building, not just the bridges between them — most trips are now shorter, and the longest are several minutes shorter. • Places with accents or apostrophes in their names — Pizza Lucé, Fogo de Chão, Jalapeño Mexican Grill, Tom's Watch Bar — can now be found by typing them however you like. • Somewhere open around the clock now says "Open 24 hours" instead of claiming it closes at midnight. • The Government Plaza and Warehouse District light-rail stations are searchable. • "You've arrived" no longer appears while you're still walking. • Starting a second trip now routes from where you actually are, instead of where your last trip began. • The map's credits now name OpenStreetMap for the skyway data itself, not just the map underneath it.

Hotels are where you'd expect them, and the map filters are simpler. • Every downtown hotel now shows under the Hotels filter. Most of them were filed under Landmarks by mistake, so the filter meant for them was turning up nearly empty. • Fewer filter buttons: landmarks like theatres, museums and public art now appear under Misc. rather than taking a row of their own.

Far more places, a position that stays on the skyway, and feedback you can send without leaving the app. • Search now finds hundreds more places — hotels, the downtown Target, shops, clinics, offices, even the skyway shoe repair. Somewhere just off the network says so, and tells you which building to walk out of. • New Hotels and Landmarks filters on the map. • Your location now follows the skyway you're walking, instead of drifting into the street below. • You can now start a route from where you are, even out on the street — the app picks the nearest skyway building and includes the walk to reach it in the trip time. It used to offer this only if you were already standing inside a mapped building. • The route dims behind you as you walk, and the arrival time now holds steady instead of jumping around. • The Feedback button opens a form right in the app — no mail app needed.

Better walking times, a cleaner map, and place cards that tell you what you actually want to know. • Tap a restaurant or shop and you'll now see how far it is, how long it takes to walk there, what floor it's on, and when the skyway itself is open — plus its logo and a link to its menu. • Businesses are much easier to tap; you no longer keep opening the building instead. • Live arrival times follow your real position along the route instead of jumping a step at a time. • Building names appear only when you zoom in, so the default map isn't crowded with text. • Route steps now say whether a building is open when you'll actually get there, not when you set off. • "Back to Ramp" now takes you back. It previously did nothing unless you were already planning a route. • Location is only asked for once, and it asks in the app's own words. • Simplified filters: "Food" covers restaurants and convenience stores; shops and services are combined under "Misc."