Organic Maps and its fork Comaps still lack a Web client. We're this on https://cartes.app , trying to push the Web further (even on mobile devices) so that you don't even need an app for most use cases.
Cool; but this is one of those instances where I wish the wonderful and benevolent FOSS developers of the world would consolidate efforts behind existing projects to make fewer better things instead of many never-finished forks. Especially since there is not yet a single open source map ui that is polished enough to compete with enterprise maps.
Agree. In terms of features Organic Maps has never been more than a pale imitation of OsmAnd, only "more ergonomic". The developers admit this themselves. So why couldn't they have just invested their time and energy into making OsmAnd more ergonomic! Ego-fueled duplication of efforts is a real problem in FOSS.
much better UI, does osmand has now colored hiking trails without downloading some extra maps?
Yes, you can toggle a setting to use the network colors. I use it mostly for hiking. The UI is a learning curve, 100%, I am curious to check another tool
> The sillyness & waste of this is obvious Until you realise that there is not one true way to show a map, and that different apps may actually have different needs. Suddenly it becomes obvious that not all apps can use the same shared offline data.
There's no fundamental reason that underlying map data used by a good % of mapping apps, couldn't be stored 1x on-device, in some standard format and shared across apps. Users could pick & choose what subset(s) of map data they want to store locally. Different apps could pick & choose what features to offer, how to use available data & how to render it. Sad to see that such a conceptually simple problem hasn't been a…
Every version of Organic Maps and CoMaps (and probably to some extent OsmAnd) use slightly different formats of maps; consider a new feature to support park bench backrests/colors/materials. That info likely wouldn't have been in the map files before for efficiency, and now it needs to be. But any given other app may not have that feature at all, and instead decides to save space and bandwidth by compressing the files instead. And a third app might improve performance on old devices by preprocessing routes and storing them in a new format in the map data.
So you can see the work of keeping map files cross-compatible would either hamper the release of new features, or take a bunch of work, all to save a few hundred MB on people's phones
> the same people, who created MapsWithMe/Maps.Me app Ah, the same people who I bought Maps.Me from in 2012 - that when I went to use it recently now bombards me with "sale ending in 4 hours!" pro subscription ad popovers in order to restore functionality (more than 10 offline map areas) that existed at the time I bought the app? No thanks.
Maps.me got sold to a series of subsequent owners. It was those subsequent owners who enshittified the app, not the original developers mentioned in your quotation. The original developers only later returned to the codebase, because it was freely licensed, and forked it in a different direction.
Why do people inflict this on themselves? OsmAnd has all the features of Organic Maps and CoMaps and MapsMe (in fact three times more features) and in 15 years of using it I have not any of these problems.
Much better performance and much less cluttered UI, at the cost of having fewer features.
The performance advantage is small to nil, IME. The UI is admittedly cleaner, though partly (as you say) that's simply because it has a ton less features.
I would define a tile as a slice of geometries, not whole features. The difference with Tileless' approach, is that they load whole features from the database and don't split them into tiles. So if a feature extends outside the current view, they would load the whole geometry rather than the intersection of the tile's extent and the geometry. Vector tiles are optimized for concurrent downloads and browser / CDN cachi…
That's interesting. So that makes it more efficient for offline maps? How much more efficient? I'm curious now!
Hi
I am th author of TilelessMap (ResilientMaps).
The idea is to not destroy data. In a tile the geometries are cut into smaller pieces. That is important to be able to do efficient caching. Vector tiles are also often simplified to fit each zoom level. This means that the data is quite worthless for anything byt rendering.
So far tilelessmap is also just rendering. But it opens up the possibilities for any gis processing/analyses that you can do on desktop gis.
Since it is difficult to cache without tiles it has to be a very efficient render path. So, all polygons are pre-triangulated from the server. If you are familiar with gpu rendering you know that the gpu only can render points, lines and triangels as primitives. Triangulation is a quite expensive step. In a tile-redenerer that is solved by very aggressive simplification. At each zoom level quite few geoemtries and vector points are actually shown. In tilelessmap a polygon is encoded in twkb as a list of vertices, and after that, indexes into the vertex list how the gpu builds triangels. The vertex list is decoded into VBO (vertex buffer object) and the triangle index list is decoded into EBO (element buffer object) This is very efficient, and even in a phone many geometries and vertices can be rendered. No cache needed, which reduces complexety and makes it possible to keep large geometries without cutting them in tiles.
Also, the storage in the db is relational. This means that you can keep a full datamodel all the way out to the deveice. This opens a lot of possibilities.
I hope that I will get time to furhter develop this. I think this is filling a gap in gis of today. More like a modern version of ArcPad (but so far without the functionality). It is all GPL v3 licensed.
Hope this helps understanding the incitaments for the project.
This isn't true, I don't know any FOSS OSM apps that have any approval process.
I can imagine it is not the same everywhere. I guess I have an active local chapter of editors. Given that I have 2 comments disagreeing and none concurring I guess this is an exception.
I've been editing OSM since 2015 and contributing to FOSS OSM apps for about half that, there have been conflicts or special cases in the past but edits on StreetComplete, OsmAnd, Organic Maps, and CoMaps all go live without any mandatory review. There's a "request review" checkbox on OSM changesets, but it's somewhat rare to actually get a review and the edit is live in the meantime
Organic Maps was my go to app for a navigation app where you can fix errors yourself immediately! So much better than having to work for free on the proprietary apps, and hope they accept your edits There’s a fork from one year ago, CoMaps, that is gaining different features E.g., I am adding CarPlay Dashboard support that you can test by joining the TestFlight We are in great need of both more testers and some prope…
I have used OsmAnd+ for well over 15 years by now, which also uses OSM data, just like these. And I have used JOSM on my PC to fix the OSM data myself. Does Organic maps / CoMaps offer anything OsmAnd+ doesn't for someone who uses it for car navigation (especially on back roads in the wilderness) as well as hiking? (All in the Nordic countries.) I also record tracks with it.
In my experience from years ago, OsmAnd was always very slow when searching and also didn't find much, as if it required a 100 percent match for anything one searches. Really annoying. Then I discovered Organic Maps, which behaved better, and more recently switched CoMaps, due to ideological reasons.
Always the rows about some kind of BS that fragments, fractures, and defuses the efforts into pet projects instead of ever actually being a viable alternative for the majority of people to corporate offerings. The hardest thing about any effort that is two or more people is the interpersonal, coordination, consensus, and organization aspects. Everything else is easy in comparison.
It makes sense. People generally want at least one of: money or decision-making power. If they have to negotiate, constantly settle, and get no money, that's a hard sell.
How hard a sell that is depends heavily on how much that person values their time. I know people who are experts in their field, who have had their with-source Wikipedia edits reverted to incorrect or misleading information by people who have more time to argue online than they do.
To the best of my knowledge, Organic Maps is a dying project. CoMaps was forked from Organic Maps because of shift in how things were being done and ignored. I mean, those in IT know very well how that is ending. CoMaps is highly active and receiving new features release by release. If you wanna use a 5 stars app based on OpenStreet Maps: https://www.comaps.app/download/ The fact that OP just posted Organic Maps URL…
Does this amazing new fork of a fork have colored hiking trails as this "dying" Organic Maps? I know the answer, tried both, I will let myself out...
Yes, CoMaps has it and I used it this weekend.
Trails and 4WD tracks have a distinctive colour semi-continue lines. I am using exactly that to discover new places and it has been awesome.