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CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

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71–80 of 91 posts

Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

#72
Everybody here compares CoMaps with OsmAnd, but for me most interesting part of article is different. Their bottleneck was not rendering or routing, it was that every map update needed new app release, so it had to pass through app store review. They decoupled this, processing went from 10 days to about 3, now fresh data weekly for whole planet, and around 35 hours when emergency is declared.

Very unglamorous engineering, and it is what actually made buildings traced in Tasking Manager reach people standing in the rubble.

Also worth to say: you can help with this part from home. During activation the tracing is done from satellite imagery, local knowledge is not required.

Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

#73
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tell our users that OsmAnd is great if you want a mapping swiss army knife in your pocket: it does a little bit of everything, for power users. It has plugins and customizability. CoMaps' mission is to be an accessible usable privacy-first FOSS map app for the entire world (average people) and so we always have our eye on the typical expected user experience and what obstacles remain between them and uninstalling…

I haven't tried using osmand much yet, but one concerning thing is the info I encountered that long (as in, cross-country) trips could take minutes (or hours?) to provide a route for. I haven't actually tested it yet, but it definitely gave me pause

It is real but not so dramatic as you heard. Offline routing must walk the graph across many downloaded regions, so time grows fast with distance. Trip inside one country is usually seconds, whole continent can be minutes. Standard trick is to put two or three intermediate points on the route. Then engine solves several short problems instead of one huge one, and answer comes almost immediately. Also OsmAnd can use online routing when you have signal, offline engine is fallback. So the bad case happens only when you plan very long route and have no connection at same time, which is not typical situation.

Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

#74
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has more features but is slower and clunkier Just to clarify: OsmAnd has more features, CoMaps and Organic Maps are much faster. (Aside: I'm using CoMaps myself. The main missing features are tracking (I use OpenTracks for that) and public transportation (I use a website for that). End of aside.)

OsmAnd is not that much slower nowadays since they added the new OpenGL renderer. It is, however, less convenient and pretty. I think OsmAnd really shines for things like hiking, whereas for regular urban navigation CoMaps works just as well.

I also really like the star chart they added recently. Seems like a minor thing but it's just really handy to have it available for the few occasions you need it.

Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

#76
post #69
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tell our users that OsmAnd is great if you want a mapping swiss army knife in your pocket: it does a little bit of everything, for power users. It has plugins and customizability. CoMaps' mission is to be an accessible usable privacy-first FOSS map app for the entire world (average people) and so we always have our eye on the typical expected user experience and what obstacles remain between them and uninstalling…

To illustrate this, look at OsmAnd's most recent blog post [1]. They've recently been looking at adding pretty extensive Astronomy features. Before that, they added a lot of nautical tooling [2]. This is all very cool if you use that, but if you don't, the laundry list of such features make it harder to find the features you do use. I used OsmAnd for a long time, and it's a great app that I learned how to use well. A…

Even if it adds some complication I really enjoy just having both features available when I need to. But then I'm a sucker for gadgets.

In a way both provide answers to the question, what is that light?

Performance is the main reason to prefer CoMaps but they've gotten a lot better at it (and inevitably you have to sacrifice some speed for customisability)

Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

#77
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has more features but is slower and clunkier Just to clarify: OsmAnd has more features, CoMaps and Organic Maps are much faster. (Aside: I'm using CoMaps myself. The main missing features are tracking (I use OpenTracks for that) and public transportation (I use a website for that). End of aside.)

OsmAnd is not that much slower nowadays since they added the new OpenGL renderer. It is, however, less convenient and pretty. I think OsmAnd really shines for things like hiking, whereas for regular urban navigation CoMaps works just as well.

I gave CoMaps a shot this morning, but it doesn't support public transit in my city (Minneapolis/Saint Paul area) which is an instant deal killer. Bummer.

Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

#78

OpenStreetMap is a great ecosystem - I'm a long term contributor. Some pointers: - CoMaps is a fork of Organic Maps, which forked long time ago from Maps.me - OsmAnd is similar. It has more features but is slower and clunkier - If you see errors/missing stuff on OpenStreetMap, fix them. You need a free account for this. There are various tools to help out, such as the editor on Osm.org. Beginner-friendly editors are…

Note that there are lots of OSM editors, but sadly not a single one as simple as Google Maps for end-users.

I'm working on cartes.app, we've designed a very simple opening hours editor, but we're missing lots of other edition features.

We should also mention Everydoor or of course osm.org, the main one.

In the end, you can modify way more things yourself on OSM than Google Maps, but through a complexe ecosystem that you have to understand first, and most are missing place reviews and simple image uploading.

Both cartes.app and mapcomplete enable these, through two different databases. Mapcomplete enable Mangrove reviews and Panoramax image uploads.

Cartes enables ATProto place reviews, with pictures, and soon Panoramax upload too.

Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

#80
post #47

Funny to see this app pop up on Hacker News. I recently started tinkering with CoMaps to make it more useful for bikepacking, since I do quite a bit of it. I don’t plan to turn this fork into a product, it’s mostly something I’m building for my own needs ; but I figured it might be interesting to share: https://github.com/r0xsh/CoBike

As a fellow keen bikepacker (about six months a year), I prefer OSMAnd. More features relevant to our community, and you can install Brouter as a routing engine.
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