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

151–160 of 493 posts

Re: Organic Maps

#151

Post by lionkor »

dspillett wrote: post #105
Maxion wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I just old if I as a developer think that 10mbit/s is plenty enough? I could probably do with 1mbit/s and still be about as productive as I am now.

You are not alone. The last time a home internet upgrade felt really significant to me was going from 2mbit to 8mbit. Everything else has been luxury. Though I'll be signing up for ~160 or ~1000 as soon as the new cables the street was recently dug up to put in place are connected, I like my luxuries! I do still notice upstream improvements though. Both those old 2mbit and 8mbit connections were 256kbit up, and I cur…

DSL can usually do up to 250 mbit/s, no?

Re: Organic Maps

#152

Post by ricardobayes »

Nition wrote: post #101
jonathanstrange wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-topic, but I find it hard to believe that throttling Wifi could possibly encourage empathy. That sounds so petty to me, it's like removing printer toner and hoping that the office banter about the dysfunctional printer may somehow forge better team-spirit. Or, putting the stapler away so people go looking for it...

I think they probably mean empathy for users on slow Internet connections rather than for fellow staff. Basically making you test your software on a slow connection once a week.

While it's a good initiative, I don't think it works as this kind of throttling almost never simulates a real spotty and crap connection.

Re: Organic Maps

#153

Post by lionkor »

Maxion wrote: post #94
lionkor wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will be mega off-topic, but: > throttled wifi every Wednesday to encourage empathy As much as slow internet hampered my productivity, I used to have 15 mbit/s download speed until very recently (Germany is behind developing countries, of course, in terms of anything internet), it was good to experience. Before that, when I was living in the countryside, I had 500 KB/s. I know exactly how painful downloading 10,…

Am I just old if I as a developer think that 10mbit/s is plenty enough? I could probably do with 1mbit/s and still be about as productive as I am now.

It is plenty, until you have to work with things like docker a lot, at which point downloading 1000 packages is normal.

Or if you have Steam, and every game wants to push 10-60 GB (!) updates every few weeks - this becomes a "leave the pc on for a few nights" ordeal. With 100 mbit/s, you give it 50mbit/s and an hour and everything is updated - all while you can keep working because you still have 50 mbit/s left.

Or if you have to quickly set up a Windows VM or other VM - not only is the download the longest process of setting it up, it will also happily update forever and hog the network.

Now assume you have 2-3 devices in the network, all doing backups, downloads, auto updates, and your 10-15 mbit/s connection is gone.

Good luck doing a backup, because residential 15 mbit/s download means 1.5mbit/s upload - you cant back up anything. Or stream your desktop. Or upload images in any reasonable amount of time.

Re: Organic Maps

#154

Post by jacekm »

botanical wrote: post #96

I'm currently using Magic Earth, any major differences between the two? I realise this one's open source, but I really like Magic Earth's live traffic and recording.

If you're using maps primarily for driving I'd stick to Magic Earth.

Re: Organic Maps

#155

Post by aembleton »

mcv wrote: post #100
vintagedave wrote: post #55

This was the first time I’d heard of the app, but due to comments in this thread I downloaded it. * Website, ethos: straightforward. “Old internet” vibes, love it. They seem very active, have a presence on every platform, very impressive * The app seems very nice. Simple clear UI. Lots of features. I need to experiment for more than a few minutes but I get the impression it could replace Google Maps for me, especiall…

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'…

Worth trying out mapy.cz app for cycling. It uses OSM data; and I find it works well in the UK, I've never tried it in the Netherlands though. It has good route finding, but unfortunatelly you can't load in a GPX route: https://en.mapy.cz/zakladni?mobilepromo=1&x=15.6252330&y=49....

Re: Organic Maps

#156

Post by onli »

Aachen wrote: post #126
orbital-decay wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vers…

Well, to be fair, the search isn't working well even when you enter the exact string. I just last week searched for a specific address, entered exactly the correct street name and the app just did not show the street name in my target city as a result. When clicking on the right location (taken from memory) the address was shown correctly, just the search did not work at all.

Also, in the same city, route planning (by bus) did not work. Which was a bit funny to me, when I lived there 10 years ago the city refused to make the bus data available to Google Maps, so back then it was Google Maps that also could not do route planning there.

I like Organic Maps, with its offline functionality it provides a layer of reliability that Google Maps is missing - and my phone has no Gapps anyway. But it's a pity neither search nor navigation is close to what Google can offer.

Re: Organic Maps

#157

Post by tazjin »

ricardobayes wrote: post #147
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…

Any info on how could I have my street address corrected on Maps? They are using a random street name that no one else uses and no matter how many times I report it, they don't change it. It also doesn't matter that I'm a local guide with many, many edits.

If you work there you can maybe reach someone, but at this point the company is so large that even that doesn't help anymore in many cases ;)

Re: Organic Maps

#158

Post by ricardobayes »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #7

Organic Maps is super awesome. The routing feature is really good, too. It even works on Apple CarPlay! There are some glitches to be aware of though: Routing across region borders is often broken. Also, a warning about OSM in general: Do not blindly trust it. Map data can be very out of date in some places, especially on remote-ish hiking trails.

I threw some pretty hard challenges at it - small unknown local beach with unpaved road access. And took them brillantly. Noted all the road hazards and even knew where best to park - even with local knowledge there is no better parking around.

Amazing work, loving this app

Re: Organic Maps

#159

Post by hkt »

balencpp wrote: post #135
Aachen wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mythic Beasts are absolutely great, on that note. One of the truly old school hosts in the UK. They pay their employees a share bonus, they're technically excellent, and their services are reliable and well priced. I've been using them for years (since Bytemark got eaten by IOMart) and love them.

Re: Organic Maps

#160

Post by gorbypark »

I use Organic Maps for hiking specifically because it's not a "hiking app". There are way too many apps out there that expect you to just hike a trail that someone else has already hiked. Want to combine intersecting trails? You're out of luck. Want to use a trail you didn't explicitly pre-download without a data connection? You're out of luck

But with Organic Maps, I find it has all the trails (at least on two separate one and a half month hiking trips in Andorra), and since they're all included with the base data, you can mix and match trails and do whatever you want.

Pain points: The search isn't so great, there's a lack of names for trails and no real way to tell the "grade" of a trail. It could be a super easy walking path or some barely marked scramble.

But overall I love it and it's way better than the commercial hiking offerings (WikiLoc, AllTrails, etc)

Post reply on HN