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CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela
21–30 of 91 posts
Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela
#22Even neater, I use CoMaps on my linux laptop, with a USB GPS receiver. It beats using IP based Geocoding.
Another alternative to geoIP could be WiFi-based location detection (comparing which WiFis are near you to a database). https://beacondb.net aims to replace Mozilla's shut-down location services, with public data releases once a proper anonymisation scheme has been figured out to avoid another Mozilla event. Google and Apple apparently also have usable back-ends: afaik it's not documented or meant for public use so ymmv, but the reverse engineered API is apparently super stable and not requiring any auth.
In case you have a second device where you'd like location, or ever don't have the USB GNSS receiver on you or something :)
Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela
#23OpenStreetMap 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…
> 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.)
What website do you use for public transportation?
Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela
#24after about 6 years of using OSMAnd, i’m pivoting to CoMaps for a hike through switzerland that i’m leaving for tonight. i don’t actually need all of the features of OSMAnd and just downloading maps costs a subscription now. id pay outright for it but i just can’t justify a subscription for how infrequently i use it
Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela
#25I used this for my family's recent trip in Lisbon and Prague. It worked great! The OSM data was reasonably up-to-date for all of our destinations; I don't remember encountering bad information, even though I often double-checked with other mapping providers (which aren't immune to issues with out-of-date information). One awesome feature was being able to find "drinking water" while we were walking around. I did come…
The problem I have most of all with the routing is that it seems to default to my location as either the From or To value (whichever is the one I haven't selected). Once that's been chosen it's not immediately clear how to change it, all you can do is view the route. That's a fine solution when you're immediately looking to go somewhere, but it's not great when you're trying to plot a route between two places in adva…
> The problem I have most of all with the routing is that it seems to default to my location as either the From or To value (whichever is the one I haven't selected). Once that's been chosen it's not immediately clear how to change it
Yeah this is an oft-asked question at least for OsmAnd, but I was recently corrected on this myself: so long as you don't press 'start' on the route, you can always change the from position freely and it won't flip back to your current location. You can close the navigation window (back button, swipe it away, or tap on the map) to get the map view back in full-screen for further browsing and selecting another point that you want as departure point, waypoint, or (subsequent) destination. Rinse and repeat until you have the route figured out with all the waypoints :)
I use this a lot for planning mapping routes. Another protip is to go into the waypoints view and on the top right you can do traveling salesman sorting to get the shortest way that visits all waypoints
CoMaps/OrganicMaps I don't know; I'm one of those who grew up with OsmAnd and got used to having all those features
Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela
#26OpenStreetMap 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…
> 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.)
Wait, I just used the tracking the other day and generated a GPX from it. It also drew me an elevation map and gave me some other info about the trip. Is there some other tracking that it can't do?
Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela
#27CoMaps is the best. They recently integrated Panoramax into CoMaps, which gives street view in many locations.
Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela
#28A potted history of mobile OSM-based mapping. First there was Osmand. AKA OSMAnd or officially OsmAnd. It was was powerful but complicated. Normies had never heard of it and preferred Maps.me, a user-friendly alternative with an opaque business model. Then something at Maps.me turned sour and the more privacy-minded normies turned to Organic Maps. Then something at Organic Maps turned sour and some of them moved to C…
OsmAnd is a great powerusers app. I use it daily. However, I would not recommend OsmAnd to a normie. My family members, especially the older ones, all use CoMaps because it is much more friendly to them.
100% this. I use OsmAnd very very frequently (it displays on my dash via Android Auto whenever I drive), but try and do something like load a GPX and show the line in a given color... Or add a pin at a specific point... It's not straightforward at all.
Powerful, but very not straightforward.
Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela
#29A potted history of mobile OSM-based mapping. First there was Osmand. AKA OSMAnd or officially OsmAnd. It was was powerful but complicated. Normies had never heard of it and preferred Maps.me, a user-friendly alternative with an opaque business model. Then something at Maps.me turned sour and the more privacy-minded normies turned to Organic Maps. Then something at Organic Maps turned sour and some of them moved to C…
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…
Please please, fix the long-standing bug: make it possible to use the navigation in "north is always up" mode.
Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela
#30after about 6 years of using OSMAnd, i’m pivoting to CoMaps for a hike through switzerland that i’m leaving for tonight. i don’t actually need all of the features of OSMAnd and just downloading maps costs a subscription now. id pay outright for it but i just can’t justify a subscription for how infrequently i use it
Come on, OsmAnd's subscriptions are super cheap for the value you're getting.