Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Organic Maps

organicmaps.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 493 posts

Re: Organic Maps

#131

Post by red_admiral »

tazjin wrote: post #99
bertil wrote: post #40

I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps offline properly. It’s truly staggering how, even when I do everything I can to say: save this journey, don’t delete the map around it, don’t delete the journey, just passively show me where I am next to it, it will gleefully delete everything. I once met their lead designer (who had just changed to work at another FAANG) and… boy was that not a conversati…

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…

The UK system is that the pair ("number", postcode) must be unique for any postal address; "number" is often a house number but things like "1A" or even names like "Whitehall" are allowed too.

Further, as mentioned, there is a limited amount of "number" that can be associated with any one postcode (currently 100 for new codes, but some legacy postcodes may have more), so for a long enough street, the postcode will change at some point - for example Chepstow Road, Newport changes from NP182LU to NP182LX at some point. If you have more addresses in a single building than the 100 limit, then the postcode indeed changes within the building.

This is quite useful as the standard way of entering a shipping address is you type your postcode, and then select the exact address from a dropdown, and there's a natural limit on how long you have to scroll to find yours.

Re: Organic Maps

#132

Post by hnarn »

I’ve used maps.me for years and years, I had no idea it had been forked by the original creators. I’ll definitely move over to using this instead.

Re: Organic Maps

#134

Post by rob74 »

I'm currently using OSMAnd, which is pretty powerful, but also feels a bit overloaded UI-wise - does anyone have any experience on how Organic Maps compares to it? Sounds like it could be a worthwile alternative. Especially the claim "go for a weeklong trip on a single battery charge" sounds interesting - I have the feeling that OSMAnd actually increases battery usage, because all rendering has to be done client-side, but of course it's probably possible to optimize this. Also, the free version of OSMAnd can only download a limited number of maps (split up by regions, which are sometimes a whole country, sometimes less) - I hope that the donation-based model works out and they will not be forced to do something similar.

Re: Organic Maps

#135

Post by balencpp »

Aachen wrote: post #112
baz00 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organic maps is also 100% free unlike OSMAnd.

So how do they finance the servers from which you download the sizable map files, if there's no "pay to unlock unlimited downloads" like in OsmAnd?

"Our sponsors - Mythic Beasts ISP provides us two virtual servers with 400 TB/month of free bandwidth to help our users with maps downloads and updates."

On their github README.md.

Re: Organic Maps

#136

Post by devit »

Leo_Verto wrote: post #49

Organic Maps really nails the use case for a minimalistic, no-nonsense mapping app with great UX design. Whereas OsmAnd tries to accommodate all use cases with full configurability, which results in a mess of nested options menus, OM goes for reasonable defaults and short menu paths. Unfortunately that minimalism comes with some downsides. While OM has a great metro map, it doesn't show bus lines (which would probabl…

OsmAnd, while a bit harder to use (but not that much), is much better than Organic Maps: it can show satellite imagery from both Google and Microsoft (and download it for offline use!), has a 3D map view, supports coloring slopes, has a bunch of specialized functionality for hiking, cycling, skiing, maritime navigation, can record trails, can route according to vehicle dimensions and in general can do everything (except for things that require access to Google's data like routing based on live traffic data and showing data like opening hours that businesses put in Google Maps).

Re: Organic Maps

#137

Post by itronitron »

Very cool, I was in a small metropolitan region recently and looking up directions to get places was absolutely killing my phone battery. Seems like the perfect use for this.

Re: Organic Maps

#138

Post by raybb »

hnben wrote: post #10
dbrgn wrote: post #3

Organic Maps is less powerful than OSMAnd (on Android), but it's much more straightforward and easy to use. It's the go-to app I recommend to all casual map users that want offline maps.

In your opinion what is the most important feature missing in organic maps (compared to OSMAnd)?

For me the biggest missing feature is an easy way to sync bookmarks/saved places.

You can manually export it but it gives me a little stress that one day I'll just lose my phone after not having exported for a while.

At the very minimum it would be great to auto export the file every X days to a specified location so I can auto sync it with syncthing or something.

But a nice setup would also be supporting webdav (nextcloud) to just drop the file there automatically.

This is the related issue but doesn't have too much traction. https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/622

Re: Organic Maps

#139

Post by al_be_back »

looks great - the UI is simple/easy to use. I like the Compass Needle , it integrates well on the Map/tile as well as on Place Details popover (arrow top-right corner), so smart!

Re: Organic Maps

#140

Post by tazjin »

red_admiral wrote: post #131
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…

The UK system is that the pair ("number", postcode) must be unique for any postal address; "number" is often a house number but things like "1A" or even names like "Whitehall" are allowed too. Further, as mentioned, there is a limited amount of "number" that can be associated with any one postcode (currently 100 for new codes, but some legacy postcodes may have more), so for a long enough street, the postcode will ch…

So a thing that increments "number" is probably also "flat", which probably leads to what I understood as "household" in a large building.
Post reply on HN