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CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

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Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

#31

Post by lucgommans »

atkirtland wrote: post #23
jech wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I was recently recommended https://api.transitous.org (it's a webapp despite the domain). It can do things like "someone can pick me up on the far side and I don't mind walking 30 minutes at the start at 6 km/h, what's the optimal route to take?"

Revolutionary! Finally I don't have to look on a map to find all stations in walking/cycling/driving distance and then route to/from every possible combination of start and end station manually to see what busses and trains run there. And repeat the process with each schedule change in each involved country. Every other transport app that I know of will try to keep you within a few hundred metres of a bus stop or train station at all times and say "there exists no route" before telling you to cycle 10 minutes or from which station you have the shortest remaining distance by taxi or whatever

Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

#32

Post by jraph »

atkirtland wrote: post #23
jech wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

KDE Itinerary, a mobile and desktop application, is becoming better and better for this. It's based on MOTIS / Transitous.

I just discovered cartes.app can do this too!

Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

#33

Post by zikduruqe »

lucgommans wrote: post #22
zikduruqe wrote: post #7

Even 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 y…

Yep. When I was screwing around getting geoclue to play around with NMEA sentences, I ran across beacondb. I might replace geoclue's back end with it next time I feel like messing around.

Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

#34

Post by schubidubiduba »

lucgommans wrote: post #31
atkirtland wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What website do you use for public transportation?

I was recently recommended https://api.transitous.org (it's a webapp despite the domain). It can do things like "someone can pick me up on the far side and I don't mind walking 30 minutes at the start at 6 km/h, what's the optimal route to take?" Revolutionary! Finally I don't have to look on a map to find all stations in walking/cycling/driving distance and then route to/from every possible combination of start and…

There is actually work being done to integrate exactly this API into Comaps! Although it will certainly take some more time, especially until these more niche routing features are available

Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

#35

Post by schubidubiduba »

andrewshadura wrote: post #29
ihatehn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That has been possible for a long time, by pressing the location button to toggle it. And recently some more edge cases regarding this were fixed.

Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

#37

Post by NoboruWataya »

I use this regularly when I go on long walks out of the city (including the couple of times I've done stretches of the Camino de Santiago). The offline map support and being able to load and display GPX tracks are really helpful there. Not only because you can sometimes find yourself with spotty reception in remote areas, but also because if you are out all day and your phone battery is not the best, you can just stick on airplane mode which massively saves on battery.

CoMaps also makes it quite easy to edit information about businesses etc, so if you spot something that isn't right you can correct it right there.

Also, for long walks/hikes, OSM is excellent. Most people tend think think of OSM as "Google Maps but worse" but IMO it is clearly superior for this use case (at least, for reasonably popular routes). It will display a lot of paths that Google Maps won't and also has far more granular detail, so you can use it to find nearby water fountains, picnic benches, even bins and so on.

Re: CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela

#39

Post by amatecha »

zikduruqe wrote: post #17
pietervdvn wrote: post #12

OpenStreetMap 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…

You can also do it directly from CoMaps if you have an OSM account.

Yeah! CoMaps was actually what I used for my very first contribution to OSM! Nice lil gateway to an awesome ecosystem. Mega kudos to the CoMaps devs for doing such a great job with it.
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