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Organic Maps

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Re: Organic Maps

#361

Post by ihaveajob »

jeffbee wrote: post #273
ihaveajob wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like nobody in the Google Maps uses a bike for commuting or other daily life purposes. If they did, they wouldn't route me through the most dangerous, fast traffic street in my neighborhood, and instead they would choose the adjacent bike boulevard. Apple Maps does this much better, even though they've sent me to the wrong side of town a few times. From my early tests, Organic Maps also sends you down dangerou…

This seems local. I just checked routing from North Berkeley to Emeryville and Apple Maps routes me down the main north-south traffic sewer instead of good parallel bike routes, and Apple Maps appears unaware of the new bridge across the rail yard. Google's results are far more sensible.

Exactly this. I'm sent down Sacramento or San Pablo regularly, instead of the California or King st boulevards. Most people who ride around don't need the directions, but now and then you see someone you can tell is following them, not realizing there's a far safer option around the block.

Re: Organic Maps

#362

Post by ihatehn »

ihaveajob wrote: post #250
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 feel like nobody in the Google Maps uses a bike for commuting or other daily life purposes. If they did, they wouldn't route me through the most dangerous, fast traffic street in my neighborhood, and instead they would choose the adjacent bike boulevard. Apple Maps does this much better, even though they've sent me to the wrong side of town a few times. From my early tests, Organic Maps also sends you down dangerou…

The bike profile in OSM routers will prioritize bike paths, bike lanes, and small streets over big highways, but there's always a balance since you're unlikely to want to bike 10 miles out of your way to avoid a busy street. That balance is always in flux and can only ever be as good as the OSM data underlying it (road classification and bike tagging etc)

If you bookmark streets that it's sending you down or avoiding inaccurately and check them out later on a computer, I bet you'll find that there's some OSM tagging issue. https://osm.org has a routing tool you can compare with as well. The OM Telegram channel is always willing to take reports on where OM routes are worse than OSM.org routes, and OSM channels are happy to help figure out what tagging issues there may be.

Cheers!

Re: Organic Maps

#363

Post by ihatehn »

nani8ot wrote: post #177
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 Organic Maps and OSM in general is how searching for "water" shows nearby water fountains. Depending on the country and region it helps if your running out of water while hiking. It's not necessarily the best water but at least where I live drinking it is usually not a problem (especially if your drinking a small amount). Water is also listed in the categories tab next to WiFi, Pharmacies…

Yeah the level of detail for things people care about is truly unmatched. I like mapping doggie bag dispensers, trash cans, and park benches -- stuff Google will just never care about.

Re: Organic Maps

#364

Post by ihatehn »

chickenWing wrote: post #239
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…

Seeing all the praise in this thread, I downloaded the app, and I must admit I'm disappointed and confused at the effusion, but maybe I'm doing something wrong. I tried a very basic task of getting driving directions to a specific address and that doesn't seem to be supported. For some streets, it will give me directions to the street as a whole, but that's not useful for long streets. Other streets don't seem to exi…

A lot of the effusive praise is from people in Europe, who navigate slightly differently (often directions are based on intersection, etc) and have a lot longer OSM tradition. My guess is that you're American (or at least not European) and so unfortunately the fact is that volunteers like ourselves have to do the work of adding addresses to the map. One easy way anyone can do that is with the RapID / MapWithAI address layer from the National Address Database, I myself have taken to doing large formally-approved imports as well.

OM's only data source is OSM itself and their volunteer dev team is already overloaded so that's the only option there for now (basically the same as with OsmAnd) but if you really want an OpenStreetMaps based GPS app with full address support ASAP you can try Magic Earth in the meantime. It's not FOSS, but at least it's not Google.

As for ice cream, it's a matter of checking to see if those closer businesses are mapped correctly or not. If they're properly tagged as "ice cream" in OrganicMaps but not displaying in the correct order then that's an OM bug to report, but my guess is that they're not entered properly into OpenStreetMap to begin with. Both are free open source projects though so we can make things better ourselves without begging a big corporation to do it for us.

Cheers!

Re: Organic Maps

#366

Post by shaftway »

rqtwteye wrote: post #245
wombat-man wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think now you can search for a city or something and download the offline map

You can. But you can’t download a large region like a whole state which makes long road trips a pain. Apple Maps is even worse because it has no offline mode at all.

I've generally been really impressed with it. Would it be nice if I could pick a bigger area? Yeah. Would it be nice if I could choose the dimensions of my rectangle, or a non-rectangular shape like a state? Yeah.

But the fact that I can download a map that has all of New York City, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Delaware, and sizable chunks of 4 other states in that area for 890 MB is pretty awesome. Especially when it comes with full driving directions, business information including hours and the search capabilities? And it'll keep it up to date periodically? I'll take that win.

Re: Organic Maps

#367

Post by evantbyrne »

eisa01 wrote: post #344
evantbyrne wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, such massive delays will be the one thing preventing me from using Organic Maps. OSM being community-editable is where these map apps get most of their value. Letting the data go that stale defeats the purpose. Thanks for the link I'll keep an eye on that issue.

I don't think monthly updates is letting the data go stale, and there's a bandwidth cost of updating e.g., every day. Maybe they would update more often if they got more donations ;) Google often takes longer than that to process edits...

A month+ is incredibly stale. OSM releases full dumps on a weekly basis for free, so cost is not a reasonable excuse. It is also not normal for updates to Google Maps from business owners to take that long. I have on multiple recent occasions seen businesses push update same day in my small city. It's a shame they went through the trouble of rebranding without addressing users' most common complaint, which is that data is oftentimes wrong. Keeping it up-to-date with OSM and pushing people to contribute would help significantly.

Re: Organic Maps

#368

Post by red_admiral »

tazjin wrote: post #140
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…

So a thing that increments "number" is probably also "flat", which probably leads to what I understood as "household" in a large building.

"Flat" increments "number" if and only if it has a separate post box. If you have several flats behind the same box in a common front door - a common set-up in the UK when a larger house has been converted into several flats - then as far as the postcode system is concerned, those flats don't exist; since people still write "Flat 3, 11 Wisteria Drive ..." on letters this creates various issues with denormalised addresses.

Re: Organic Maps

#369

Post by KnackeredHues »

ihatehn wrote: post #362
ihaveajob wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like nobody in the Google Maps uses a bike for commuting or other daily life purposes. If they did, they wouldn't route me through the most dangerous, fast traffic street in my neighborhood, and instead they would choose the adjacent bike boulevard. Apple Maps does this much better, even though they've sent me to the wrong side of town a few times. From my early tests, Organic Maps also sends you down dangerou…

The bike profile in OSM routers will prioritize bike paths, bike lanes, and small streets over big highways, but there's always a balance since you're unlikely to want to bike 10 miles out of your way to avoid a busy street. That balance is always in flux and can only ever be as good as the OSM data underlying it (road classification and bike tagging etc) If you bookmark streets that it's sending you down or avoiding…

The balance is problematic in every cycling directions app. Some may be a bit more comprehensive than others in certain areas but all of them prioritize shorter routes over flatter ones.

I wish there were a true flattest route app/website that prioritized quieter roads and more gentle slopes by default using existing terrain data instead of making users manually add a bunch of waypoints using their own knowledge in order to compare elevation profiles.

Re: Organic Maps

#370

Post by MayeulC »

orbital-decay wrote: post #208
Vinnl wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you both don't know about StreetComplete yet, you should check it out: https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/#readme

Yeah I'm often using StreetComplete when walking in a city, but on a bike any operation with the phone involves stopping and switching the context. Besides, SC is intended to fill the missing or fix existing data, and sometimes I need more than that (adding/fixing paths and objects, for example). So I just record an audio note while passing by something, and later on I import the video/timelapse and edit it on my com…

I also started using EveryDoor recently, which strikes a Nice middle ground betweek StreetComplete qnd Vespucci.

https://f-droid.org/packages/info.zverev.ilya.every_door/

https://every-door.app/

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