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Organic Maps

organicmaps.app

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Re: Organic Maps

#211

Post by gorbypark »

biodranik wrote: post #168
gorbypark wrote: post #160

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 separ…

Please write us more details about search issues at support [at] organicmaps.app, or even better, create/update an issue on our Github: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues If trails have names in osm.org but names are not present in OM, please let us know, it's a bug.

Will do! I am pretty sure the trails where I hike (mostly Andorra) are just not named is OSM. I thought about trying to update some myself, but there's a lot of overlapping trails, so it would be tough to get right. For example big stretches of the same trail might be both GR-7 and GR-11 and also a local Andorran trail number. I'd rather not do it than do it and get it wrong!

Re: Organic Maps

#212

Post by sanderjd »

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…

I think this is actually a really perfect demonstration of why you often shouldn't attribute things to malice which can be explained by incompetence.

This is on my mind a lot when I see speculation about why google (or other large organizations) does various things. It's just a bunch of human beings with egos and biases and blind spots and imperfect information. Mistakes are made.

Re: Organic Maps

#213

Post by matkoniecz »

rob74 wrote: post #196
ex-googlemaps wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are significantly more people using the other modes, especially in active navigation. For example, it’s well known that Google detects traffic through the movement of active users (there was the wagon of phones traffic jam experiment). Imagine trying to do something similar with the amount of cyclists actively using Google with the necessary privacy settings enabled on any given route. It would be noisy but pos…

This sounds a bit American to me honestly - I would think that in Europe (and especially in Amsterdam) there would be enough cyclists to make the data usable. OTOH, they may not have the necessary privacy settings enabled (I think that's a minority among car users too). Of course it's also a vicious circle: if Google Maps is bad for cyclists, few cyclists will be using it, so you won't get the data you need to make i…

> Additionally, I think the proportion of cyclists using any kind of navigation solution is lower than with car drivers...

In large part because cycling is fairly resistant to traffic jams

Re: Organic Maps

#214

Post by sanderjd »

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…

Sounds like a great system! US "zip codes" are pretty useless by comparison.

Re: Organic Maps

#215

Post by ijustlovemath »

gorbypark wrote: post #205
ijustlovemath wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can tell the grade of a trail by doing Route To / Route From and selecting the walking option. After computing the route it shows you a fairly accurate elevation profile, as well as the length and total elevation gains/losses. If you're using imperial units, you can also quickly estimate difficulty by doing the following: - take the total elevation change, in hundreds of feet, eg 900ft = 9 * 100ft - take the tota…

The elevation profile is great, for sure, but I meant more like...difficulty, rather than grade? I don't know the exact word to use, but sometimes you have well used, well marked trails and other times you have a "trail" that maybe gets used a few times a year and is more like a choose your own adventure with a rock cairn or two every couple hundred meters if you are lucky.

Ah, I see! I'm not sure if OSM data can have that information, but it would be great! Some kind of bushwhack out of 10 rating?

Re: Organic Maps

#216

Post by pete_3c1f »

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…

What I especially like about this over Google is that now (If I stay with it) I have a way bigger incentive to contribute to OSM, because there's an app where I can see / use my changes.

Re: Organic Maps

#217

Post by matkoniecz »

l9i wrote: post #133

If you enjoy Organic Maps, please consider supporting them financially: https://organicmaps.app/donate/ . Supporting their serving infrastructure for numerous users is surely costly.

Right now infrastructure appears to be donated, but donations increase how much effort developers can spend on it!

Re: Organic Maps

#218

Post by matkoniecz »

orbital-decay wrote: post #102
prometheon1 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use the search functionality a lot, and is it giving you the results you want? And if so, do you have any tips on how to write search queries? I love Organic Maps, but when I try to search, I think I find what I'm looking for about 1 out of 5 times.

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.

> The same feature can be tagged in multiple ways

That is not huge problem. You can support just the most common schema. Except some rare cases it will not have real bad consequences (note: as OSM mapper I put quite significant effort into getting rid of some pointless duplicates, but I do not consider it a blocker for data use).

The problem is that making search working well with descriptive, incomplete, typoed, confused input is really, really, really hard. Google Maps search is the most amazing Google project for me.

Re: Organic Maps

#219

Post by aikinai »

jesterson wrote: post #95
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 genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps offline properly Very simple answer - they want to know everything you do online. As Google Maps is provided for free, you are the product. Convenience of the product (you) is not a priority whatsoever. > designers like to say that users are always right? It's just smoke and mirrors. Unfortunately IT breeds a number of people who have ignorant position t…

This lowbrow criticism is really old. Google doesn’t do much offline for the same reason almost no one does offline anymore; it’s hard and the number of users affected is very small.

Do you honestly think Google is looking at the number of maps users that go offline and saying, “We absolutely need their data!” rather than “Eh, not worth rearchitecting everything for.”

Not to mention they have done a lot for it even if it’s not perfect. There’s a dedicated team doing their best with it. It’s just not worth giving a lot of attention and resources.

Re: Organic Maps

#220

Post by mcv »

ex-googlemaps wrote: post #180
aix1 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We had a really nice solution but privacy considerations made it extremely difficult and limited. Would you be willing to elaborate a bit more on those privacy considerations? (I guess what I'm struggling with is how cycling is different in this regard from other modalities.)

There are significantly more people using the other modes, especially in active navigation. For example, it’s well known that Google detects traffic through the movement of active users (there was the wagon of phones traffic jam experiment). Imagine trying to do something similar with the amount of cyclists actively using Google with the necessary privacy settings enabled on any given route. It would be noisy but pos…

Is it that there are more cars? Because I live in Amsterdam, and there's definitely more bikes than cars here, yet bicycle support still sucks. Although it's possible few cyclists use Google Maps because a) it's bad, b) they don't need to, and c) you need a special clip to use your smartphone live on your bike (though that's also true for cars).
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