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Organic Maps

organicmaps.app

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Re: Organic Maps

#121

Post by Aachen »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #68
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #64

Started using Organic Maps during the pandemic, this is the app that weaned me out of Google Maps. At the moment I only really use Google Maps to check opening times of certain shops. Also way better routing for cyclists than Google maps.

You can often find opening times of shops by searching for their own Facebook page instead of using Google Maps. Moreover, you can add business’ opening hours to OpenStreetMap so that other people in future will see the opening hours in Organic Maps and other OSM-based maps. For a programming-savvy crowd like HN, the syntax of OSM’s opening-hours tag is pretty straightforward.

> by searching for their own Facebook page

At that point I'd rather open up Google and give them the data point that someone is interested in this store at this time (to make these crowdedness plots) than provide Facebook with my data ._.

If they have an own website, sure, but a Facebook page? I'm not whitelisting those IP addresses for my browser to be able to visit that.

This is why I always add the website as the most important field for a POI btw: easy to click through, always up-to-date opening hours. They're very often out of date on OSM because the shop owners only supply that info to google and call it good.

Re: Organic Maps

#122

Post by redauburn »

BlackLotus89 wrote: post #56

I often use my smartphone when driving somewhere by bike/scooter and for this only osmand is usable since background mode is not yet implemented https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/pull/4611

Background mode will be in the next release :)

Re: Organic Maps

#123

Post by snappysnap »

dspillett wrote: post #109
tazjin wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a bizarre encounter when working there, also Maps related. I lived in the UK at the time and my post code just didn't exist in Google Maps. I did some digging, and found out that in fact no post codes in the UK had been added in quite some time. Eventually I found out why: There was some lead dev on Maps, who refused to allow new imports of UK post code data because he thought they were "wrong". They were seein…

It is quite valid for one property to have multiple street addresses and therefore postcodes. It could genuinely have frontage in two streets, or it could be the result of joining two properties in the same street that originally had different postcodes – many long streets have multiple postcodes along their length¹. --- [1] For example even a not-very-long street I used to live on, Alma Terrace in York, has three po…

And it's also valid for UK postcodes to be reused, e.g. following demolition of the original buildings, e.g. tower blocks, the postcode may be deactivated for a period of time, then reactivated when new buildings elsewhere need a new postcode.

Re: Organic Maps

#124

Post by sundarurfriend »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #68
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #64

Started using Organic Maps during the pandemic, this is the app that weaned me out of Google Maps. At the moment I only really use Google Maps to check opening times of certain shops. Also way better routing for cyclists than Google maps.

You can often find opening times of shops by searching for their own Facebook page instead of using Google Maps. Moreover, you can add business’ opening hours to OpenStreetMap so that other people in future will see the opening hours in Organic Maps and other OSM-based maps. For a programming-savvy crowd like HN, the syntax of OSM’s opening-hours tag is pretty straightforward.

> You can often find opening times of shops by searching for their own Facebook page

Maybe a US thing? Where I live, less than 10% of the shops have a Facebook page, and I'd expect maybe 10% of those have up to date reliable information.

Re: Organic Maps

#125

Post by narrowtux »

I still want some app that makes the awesome brouter algorithm usable on iOS. They have an android app which is "easy" to do since the routing module is written in Java, but alas, iOS doesn't support Java.

IMO, brouter generates the best routes for bicycling with lots of options to customize for what kind of riding you want to do (road, trekking, gravel, recreational, commuting, safe and quiet vs. quick, etc.).

Right now I use brouter-web on my iPhone but it's really hard to use since the UI is really small and it's very simple to accidentally place a waypoint. After that, I send the GPX file to my bike computer.

Re: Organic Maps

#126

Post by Aachen »

orbital-decay wrote: post #102
prometheon1 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use the search functionality a lot, and is it giving you the results you want? And if so, do you have any tips on how to write search queries? I love Organic Maps, but when I try to search, I think I find what I'm looking for about 1 out of 5 times.

Reliable search is just generally hard to implement for OSM, as it's highly chaotic. There's no single schema forced upon everyone. The same feature can be tagged in multiple ways, which are dependent on the consensus between mappers, country/jurisdiction, culture, particular mapper preference etc. This is especially relevant for addresses and businesses.

Um, the wiki is the single schema forced upon everyone: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org

Searching the schema works just fine, it's just hard to find typos and support natural language queries. Google set the standard for searching, we need to remember that we're literally comparing a volunteer project against the world leader in search who also has the money to employ a hundred distributed servers for every query versus the offline on-your-phone search of something like OsmAnd.

Borders is one of the few things that need to be different between countries (county, municipality, city group (Kreisstadt), city region (Städteregion), etc.: every country has a different hierarchy of subdivisions which OSM translates to numeric admin_level values). Some countries use the abbreviated street names like St. John St., others have the convention to expand Saint John Street. Different road types have different rules (is a tractor allowed on rural motorways? In Uganda maybe yes). These handful of things which you'll need to set per country are defined on the wiki, but 99% is the same. Particularly for searching where the name and POI tags like shop=x are the most relevant: after normalising the street name abbreviations, you're pretty much good.

Re: Organic Maps

#127

Post by OfSanguineFire »

Aachen wrote: post #121
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can often find opening times of shops by searching for their own Facebook page instead of using Google Maps. Moreover, you can add business’ opening hours to OpenStreetMap so that other people in future will see the opening hours in Organic Maps and other OSM-based maps. For a programming-savvy crowd like HN, the syntax of OSM’s opening-hours tag is pretty straightforward.

> by searching for their own Facebook page At that point I'd rather open up Google and give them the data point that someone is interested in this store at this time (to make these crowdedness plots) than provide Facebook with my data ._. If they have an own website, sure, but a Facebook page? I'm not whitelisting those IP addresses for my browser to be able to visit that. This is why I always add the website as the…

Because a Facebook page is the business’s own advertisement, you can add the opening hours displayed there straight to OpenStreetMap. (Google’s information obviously cannot be copied into OSM, and besides, sometimes its opening hours are guessed from visitor data instead of added by the business itself.)

> This is why I always add the website as the most important field for a POI

It has been over a decade now since most physical-retail businesses began giving up on maintaining their own websites, using only Facebook pages instead, unless they are part of large chains.

Re: Organic Maps

#129

Post by mcv »

coolgoose wrote: post #110
mcv wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had it for a while, but I don't use it nearly enough. I still rely on Google Maps for most things, until Google Maps lets me down. Which it does mostly when I'm on vacation. Although now that I think about it, Google Maps lets me down on vacation because I'm in unfamiliar territory and I have no idea how to correct for the mistakes it makes. When I'm at home (in Amsterdam) it makes plenty of mistakes too, but I'…

The amount of mistakes Google makes in the Netherlands when it comes to bikes is mind-blowing. If you don't know the area or manually check the maps it takes you trough a lot more car places that it should do.

Yeah, I think I've gotten too used to it and learned to automatically compensate for it, but the more I think about it, the more I realise just how terrible Google is at bike routes.

Re: Organic Maps

#130

Post by ricardobayes »

It installed automatically on the external storage to save space!

Finally someone thinks of the general population who doesn't buy the latest gadget just to keep up. A 3-4-5 year old smartphone should be perfectly adequate if devs actually thought of supporting the "normal phones".

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