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Show HN: My nights and weekends project based on openstreetmaps

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Re: Show HN: My nights and weekends project based on openstreetmaps

#4

Post by rithal »

gcb wrote: post #2

Lame for not mentioning map source prominently. Will probably checkout when i have an ios device...

Added the credit as a main feature. Now that I think of it, it is a feature rather than just a credit. OpenStreetMap is indeed better than many commercial mapping data sources for some of the cities.

The app has the credit as an overlay in the map screen so it's very hard to miss. I'd missed it on the website. Thanks for pointing out.

Re: Show HN: My nights and weekends project based on openstreetmaps

#6

Post by grecy »

Looks great. A couple of questions:

1) Are the maps route-able? Can I use this for turn-by-turn?

2) Can I download the entire world OpenStreetMap and use it with this app? For a round-the-world I'm planning, I'd like to get maps of everywhere. (For example, last time I drove from Alaska to Argentina, and I'd like to be able to use the OpenStreetMaps of everywhere in between)

Thanks!

Re: Show HN: My nights and weekends project based on openstreetmaps

#7

Post by danso »

Reading through the reviews on iTunes (which are generally positive), I noticed that there were a number of mentions of how their city/region was not on the map, and after they contacted the developer, that area was downloadable.

Theoretically, why isn't all of the geography downloadable when given certain parameters? I'm unfamiliar with how OpenStreetMaps works, so was just curious what kind of manual tweaking/map-downloading that you, the developer, have to do.

Re: Show HN: My nights and weekends project based on openstreetmaps

#8

Post by rithal »

danso wrote: post #7

Reading through the reviews on iTunes (which are generally positive), I noticed that there were a number of mentions of how their city/region was not on the map, and after they contacted the developer, that area was downloadable. Theoretically, why isn't all of the geography downloadable when given certain parameters? I'm unfamiliar with how OpenStreetMaps works, so was just curious what kind of manual tweaking/map-d…

Why the entire planet is not available: I wanted to host it on an inexpensive server (only what's needed), generate maps only for regions that are popular among my target segment (popular tourist destinations mostly) since compute was also an issue - I generated all the maps on a VM on my desktop. I download the openstreetmap data to my local hard disk for the regions I need, generate the maps using mapnik and extract poi data using python utilities that I wrote. Not a whole lot of tweaking but I did have to write my own tools.

Re: Show HN: My nights and weekends project based on openstreetmaps

#9

Post by rithal »

grecy wrote: post #6

Looks great. A couple of questions: 1) Are the maps route-able? Can I use this for turn-by-turn? 2) Can I download the entire world OpenStreetMap and use it with this app? For a round-the-world I'm planning, I'd like to get maps of everywhere. (For example, last time I drove from Alaska to Argentina, and I'd like to be able to use the OpenStreetMaps of everywhere in between) Thanks!

No routing as of now. My main target segment is tourists on foot in popular travel destinations outside of their country. I think a map of the entire world is too big to fit on an iPhone (at least in pre-rendered map tiles - not sure if 64G can hold vector data either). An option for you could be to download the maps of all towns in your path and rely on paper maps for highways connecting the cities. If you do end up using my app and don't find a map you need, just let me know :)

Re: Show HN: My nights and weekends project based on openstreetmaps

#10

Post by grecy »

rithal wrote: post #9
grecy wrote: post #6

Looks great. A couple of questions: 1) Are the maps route-able? Can I use this for turn-by-turn? 2) Can I download the entire world OpenStreetMap and use it with this app? For a round-the-world I'm planning, I'd like to get maps of everywhere. (For example, last time I drove from Alaska to Argentina, and I'd like to be able to use the OpenStreetMaps of everywhere in between) Thanks!

No routing as of now. My main target segment is tourists on foot in popular travel destinations outside of their country. I think a map of the entire world is too big to fit on an iPhone (at least in pre-rendered map tiles - not sure if 64G can hold vector data either). An option for you could be to download the maps of all towns in your path and rely on paper maps for highways connecting the cities. If you do end up…

Thanks

> No routing as of now.

Are you planning to add it?

> I think a map of the entire world is too big to fit on an iPhone

Fair enough, but I'm still wondering if I can just use "raw" OpenStreetMap data and load it into your app? Do you have some kind of internal "conversion" process to make the map usable with your app? maybe you could release that tool so we can do it for ourselves? (Again, I'm sure you don't want to manually convert maps of every town on the Pan American highway from Alaska to Argentina for me (that's 16 countries worth))

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