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Organic Maps

organicmaps.app

21–30 of 382 posts

Re: Organic Maps

#21

Organic Maps a great app in many ways, but I still don't get how people can actually use it every day and say it replaces Google Maps when its search feature totally stinks. I know it's a hard problem, but this is the number one thing that needs to somehow be fixed. I can't tell if I'm just too dumb or if FOSS/degoogle fanboys are just pretending. I just know I've tried to use it exclusively many times and always had…

I guess it depends on how you use Google Maps, but I mainly navigate to addresses, and Comaps works fine for that.

Re: Organic Maps

#22
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two things keeping me using "Big Map". 1. Address lookups. Many of the buildings in OSM have yet to get street addresses added, so navigating to an address is a bit hit or miss. This gets fixed with time as people update the maps and wouldn't be a show stopper. 2. Real time traffic and detour navigation. This is really needed when navigating around busy cities where a wreck on a major highway can result in…

There's one more for me: reliable store hours.

Both this and addresses is something that's really easy to survey with StreetComplete.

Google has the benefit of having their own street-level imagery for house numbers and street names, Android devices for real-time traffic info, and the ability to simply scrape web pages for shop data including opening hours. but in places with a reasonable number of active mappers, OSM is so much richer and more up to date.

Re: Organic Maps

#23
post #12

Will this take down Big Maps?

There are two things keeping me using "Big Map". 1. Address lookups. Many of the buildings in OSM have yet to get street addresses added, so navigating to an address is a bit hit or miss. This gets fixed with time as people update the maps and wouldn't be a show stopper. 2. Real time traffic and detour navigation. This is really needed when navigating around busy cities where a wreck on a major highway can result in…

Yeah (2) is the killer feature especially in totalitarian shitholes (pretty much every country nowadays) full of money grab ops disguised as police checkpoints and cameras.

I wonder if we can build a decentralized version of such a reporting service.

Re: Organic Maps

#24
post #12

Will this take down Big Maps?

There are two things keeping me using "Big Map". 1. Address lookups. Many of the buildings in OSM have yet to get street addresses added, so navigating to an address is a bit hit or miss. This gets fixed with time as people update the maps and wouldn't be a show stopper. 2. Real time traffic and detour navigation. This is really needed when navigating around busy cities where a wreck on a major highway can result in…

Agree!

CoMaps fork is adding OpenAddresses integration and traffic (linked above)!

https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/pulls/4162

Re: Organic Maps

#25
Always loved this. There are still parts of the UK where you’ll have no data offline navigation is great, and the walking paths are better than you can get elsewhere.

Re: Organic Maps

#26

Organic Maps a great app in many ways, but I still don't get how people can actually use it every day and say it replaces Google Maps when its search feature totally stinks. I know it's a hard problem, but this is the number one thing that needs to somehow be fixed. I can't tell if I'm just too dumb or if FOSS/degoogle fanboys are just pretending. I just know I've tried to use it exclusively many times and always had…

I actually think the search feature rocks, because you have high fidelity OSM maps to query. Can't search for drinkable wells in Google Maps!

But then, it of course isn't Google Maps. It is likely to be more out of date and will not understand "natural" search queries as Google does. I believe it just takes some getting used to. There is overlap between the two, each service has its strengths and weaknesses, but also unique features.

Re: Organic Maps

#27
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two things keeping me using "Big Map". 1. Address lookups. Many of the buildings in OSM have yet to get street addresses added, so navigating to an address is a bit hit or miss. This gets fixed with time as people update the maps and wouldn't be a show stopper. 2. Real time traffic and detour navigation. This is really needed when navigating around busy cities where a wreck on a major highway can result in…

There's one more for me: reliable store hours.

Agree, which is why I added support for displaying when the hours were last updated in CoMaps

Organic Maps didn’t accept my PR with it…

https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/688

Re: Organic Maps

#28
I'm very pleased to see open source mapping/navigation systems. I have had the hypothesis for a while that many of the UI/UX designers on the google maps team do not actually drive a car.

Re: Organic Maps

#29
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any ones which tries to avoid realtime traffic, especially in India? Also ones which detects some shortcuts as narrow, meandering roads that will be extremely slow.

There’s actually work ongoing on live traffic support from various public sources! https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/projects/21877

This looks really solid. It's the thing that would make me switch over. 90% of the time I know exactly where I'm going but need Google Maps to tell me what's unexpectedly in the way while I'm trying to get there.

Re: Organic Maps

#30
post #28

I'm very pleased to see open source mapping/navigation systems. I have had the hypothesis for a while that many of the UI/UX designers on the google maps team do not actually drive a car.

People at Apple are not left-handed, they don't drive, they don't work out, and they don't seem to go out in the cold very much. Oh, and they definitely don't play video games.
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