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Organic Maps

organicmaps.app

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Re: Organic Maps

#221

Post by pietervdvn »

raybb wrote: post #114
mcv wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I recently moved to Amsterdam and I find Google maps biking directions are often wrong or just a bit worse than organic maps. But also when organic maps it wrong (like one time it though there was a nice connecting sidewalk that no longer existed) it was super easy to go edit on OSM and next time I'll get the right directions. My one wish was the OSM had a great app for discovering POI or reviews. Like something that…

Here you go: https://mapcomplete.org/shops.html?z=12.2&lat=52.36511&lon=4...

Note: it takes a little while to load all of Amsterdam.

Disclaimer: I'm the (main) dev of mapcomplete

Re: Organic Maps

#222

Post by ygra »

aix1 wrote: post #175
palata wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you find it "pretty good", I guess you have never tried an OpenStreetMap-based app like Organic Maps. I also like OSMAnd a lot (I use both for different use-cases).

> I also like OSMAnd a lot (I use both for different use-cases). This is the first come I come across Organic Maps but I do use OSMAnd. I'm wondering how the two compare and would love to hear more about the use cases you have for each of them.

I find the UI in Organic Maps to be much nicer. OSMAnd seems to have a larger feature set and extensions and stuff you may or may not need/want/require. Navigation seem to add an announcement in OSMAnd whenever the OSM object for a road changes (seemingly), which leads to a number of totally unnecessary »Continue straight on road X«.

Those were a few differences I noticed.

Re: Organic Maps

#223

Post by mcv »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #201
mcv wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe slightly better, but still not great. It's skipping the eastern part of the Sarphatistraat. Also it struggles with street names and encourages you to only type a town, which isn't very useful. I like that it allows you to choose between paved, gravel or any. Although gravel may still be too limited for some; mountainbikers like dirt tracks, and I've had Google Maps send me through loose sand that would probably…

> Also it struggles with street names and encourages you to only type a town, which isn't very useful. Oh, good spot. Fixed. OSM geocoding is better than it used to be - I used to just say "town" because streetnames were partial, but they're pretty good now. If you have a start and endpoint that should use Sarphatistraat but don't, I'm all ears. (It's my site!)

That's an amazingly quick fix!

Try "Feike de Boerlaan" to "Vondelpark". I would expect the trip to take the Czaar Peterstraat and then the Sarphatistraat, but instead it takes the Panamalaan, Zeeburgerdijk, Mauritskade, and only switches to the Sarphatistraat at the Weesperplein, which I think is also the point where the Sarphatistraat changes from a bike street to a regular street with a bike lane. Although it later switches back to bike street again yet the route stays on the bike street.

So I have no idea what's going on with that first part of the Sarphatistraat. It's a really nice route, yet all apps hate it.

Re: Organic Maps

#224

Post by matkoniecz »

orbital-decay wrote: post #146
Aachen wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OSM Wiki is not the mechanically enforced schema, it's just a collection of knowledge about the actual tagging practice. Which is entirely chaotic, and the collective consensus is dynamic - usually the most used tag wins, but there are less used alternatives here and there. There are many good proposals that failed to get traction due to too few people backing them up or for some other reason. The addresses in partic…

See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Any_tags_you_like for confirmation of the first paragraph.

Re: Organic Maps

#225

Post by benhurmarcel »

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.

You need ~25Mbps to stream 4k content.

Re: Organic Maps

#226

Post by kevincox »

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…

It isn't very difficult to log the events to disk and send them later. In fact I would be shocked if they didn't do this already. Offline support wouldn't noticeably affect the data they receive. In fact it may help it if people are using the app more and the event delivery is more reliable.

One real reason could be ads. Unless they are pre-loading ads for offline display than offline browsing will not produce revenue.

Re: Organic Maps

#227

Post by titaniumtown »

ricardobayes wrote: post #142
mcv wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Google displays my street name wrong and there is no way to change it. I've reported it 10+ times and nothing is happening. I don't know where they got that street name from but it's definitely not the "official name" of the street as recorded by the official authorities. And this is in Europe on a street where the google car goes through basically every few years. I can't even describe the level of frustration this…

But with Organic Maps, since it uses OpenStreetMap, I've actually corrected a bunch of street names near me and have added about 4,000 house numbers. It's really nice when you're able to improve the area near you.

Re: Organic Maps

#228

Post by michaelmior »

> Organic Maps doesn't request excessive permissions to spy on you

To be fair, the requesting of these permissions doesn't mean the other app highlighted is "spying on you." Some of those permissions are required for certain features. Not everyone will be comfortable with that, and that's ok. But I think it's unfair to suggest that the intention is spying.

Re: Organic Maps

#229

Post by johannes1234321 »

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…

How many cyclists use Google Maps to navigate? I guess (with no true facts) most cyclists know their primary routes and when going somewhere new have a rough idea and just check for the last part.

Whereas car drivers often use navigation all the time to see traffic and alternatives, which are non-issues for cyclists.

Thus even with many cyclists the information they collect is less.

Re: Organic Maps

#230

Post by Symbiote »

sanderjd wrote: post #214
red_admiral wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As an example, with a postcode "N1C 4DN" we soon learn that means North London (the N), the innermost district (the 1) and the innermost bit of that (the C). Stick it in https://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode and we have 5 addresses to choose from.

There are usually 10 to 30 — if you work in a large office it probably has a postcode just for that office, for houses you share with 20-30 or so others. (Very large businesses might have separate postcodes for individual departments, e.g. an electric utility probably has one for handling bills, and another for everything else.)

"What's the postcode please?"

"N1C 4DN"

"And the number?"

"12"

Now they have the whole address. Satnav can take "N1C 4DN" and be very close: https://goo.gl/maps/sGR5XXhmUsLmD2UBA (not the best polygon, should be Handyside Street.)

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