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Organic Maps

organicmaps.app

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Re: Organic Maps

#381

Post by eh__dub »

Using OSM is not unique amongst mapping apps. Almost every company's mapping app is using OSM data in some way.

The no ads bit is nice.

I don't think I properly understand the "no tracking" claim. I don't want to be tracked by miscellaneous third parties, but designers and engineers should absolutely be instrumenting the app so they can understand user behavior via empirical means.

I saw another comment mention they can update OSM via this app. That is def cool and I wish more apps supported that use case and educated users about it.

The topo map leaves something to be desired. Once you go Gaia Topo, it's hard to look at other companies' topo maps.

Re: Organic Maps

#382

Post by ihatehn »

rqtwteye wrote: post #51
baz00 wrote: post #2

I cannot really express how much praise I have for Organic Maps. It has got me out of the mire a couple of times due to the complete offline capability and paper maps being completely wrong. The OSM base layer is better than a lot of native maps out there. Not only that, you can search for a toilet almost anywhere, including in the middle of nowhere in central Asia, and it found one!

Organic Maps is great. I just wish OSM worked on search more. They are behind there.

The main issue with OSM search at least in America is a lack of addresses. Anyone can help with this by importing addresses from the National Address Database: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/watmildon/diary/400812

Re: Organic Maps

#383

Post by ryukoposting »

Wow, I had no idea this existed 10 minutes ago, and I'm already thinking about deleting my AllTrails account. I'm driving about 6 hours tonight and I think I'm going to give this thing a try.

The UI is tremendous. Takes a while for it to make longer routes, but that could be my old phone's fault. One thing I don't like - it doesn't seem to be possible to save a route. You can save places, but not routes. Especially for hiking trips that have very particular manually-selected paths and/or lots of destinations, it would be nice to be able to save a route to a list, tap it, and have that route show up immediately instead of waiting for it to calculate.

Re: Organic Maps

#384

Post by ihatehn »

devit wrote: post #136
Leo_Verto wrote: post #49

Organic Maps really nails the use case for a minimalistic, no-nonsense mapping app with great UX design. Whereas OsmAnd tries to accommodate all use cases with full configurability, which results in a mess of nested options menus, OM goes for reasonable defaults and short menu paths. Unfortunately that minimalism comes with some downsides. While OM has a great metro map, it doesn't show bus lines (which would probabl…

OsmAnd, while a bit harder to use (but not that much), is much better than Organic Maps: it can show satellite imagery from both Google and Microsoft (and download it for offline use!), has a 3D map view, supports coloring slopes, has a bunch of specialized functionality for hiking, cycling, skiing, maritime navigation, can record trails, can route according to vehicle dimensions and in general can do everything (exc…

OsmAnd does more, but I recommend Organic Maps to my family and friends. Unless one of my friends is an avid hiker/biker or map nerd

Re: Organic Maps

#385

Post by ihatehn »

ajuc wrote: post #106
Leo_Verto wrote: post #49

Organic Maps really nails the use case for a minimalistic, no-nonsense mapping app with great UX design. Whereas OsmAnd tries to accommodate all use cases with full configurability, which results in a mess of nested options menus, OM goes for reasonable defaults and short menu paths. Unfortunately that minimalism comes with some downsides. While OM has a great metro map, it doesn't show bus lines (which would probabl…

I love OSMand but I can't figure out why it announces speed bumps when I'm in walking and biking mode but not when in car mode :) But it's still the best navigation app I've used.

That's a good bug to report to OsmAnd. It used to be they announced a turn every time the road hit a slight angle too which was absolute insanity lol

Re: Organic Maps

#386

Post by ihatehn »

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.

I think Komoot uses openstreetmap and is a little more hiking oriented, that might be useful to you.

Re: Organic Maps

#387

Post by ihatehn »

pwillia7 wrote: post #339

Love it. thanks for making this. Feature Request: Add a Thrilling style mode for navigation so I can map fun drives without using a real computer. https://help.tomtom.com/hc/en-us/articles/10428741608466-Rou... Here is more information about the variables they use to figure out the most thrilling route -- https://developer.tomtom.com/blog/build-different/thrills-an...

One way I did this randomly the other day was choosing Bicycle or Walking mode which prioritize slow streets and pedestrian pathways. Maybe a different definition of thrilling than most people in cars, but I appreciate being taken into other areas of town I might not normally go since they're not major roads.

OsmAnd also has many different navigation profile options, you might try customizing that to get what you want. Organic Maps focuses on what the bulk of people need to navigate decently, so that the end result is simple and usable for everyone even if it's not the most feature-packed.

Re: Organic Maps

#388

Post by ihatehn »

wds wrote: post #324
izacus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do not blindly trust it. Map data can be very out of date in some places, especially on remote-ish hiking trails. Also, for the love of everything that's holy, do the same with Apple/Google Maps. They can be horribly wrong to the point of being actively dangerous.

Can't trust Apple/Google, can't trust OSM, can't trust paper maps... What's the right answer here?

It highly depends on what you're doing (a road trip vs a grocery run vs hiking mountainous back country) but the first step is to do a sanity check of the route. It's very easy for many GPS apps to route people to the center of an airport for example (i.e. the middle of the runway) instead of the main terminal, and only recently have a few apps managed to do better about that. Other times you can just easily spot that it's not a great route by reviewing it for ten seconds.

Re: Organic Maps

#389

Post by ihatehn »

IshKebab wrote: post #32
izacus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do not blindly trust it. Map data can be very out of date in some places, especially on remote-ish hiking trails. Also, for the love of everything that's holy, do the same with Apple/Google Maps. They can be horribly wrong to the point of being actively dangerous.

For roads though they generally hook into official sources (e.g. Ordnance Survey in the UK) so they are guaranteed to get updated when the layout changes. That's not true for OSM. (Though obviously in the UK there are enough map nerds that it's very unlikely to be an issue.)

Apple and Google are not guaranteed to be updated when government road data changes. They do their best and they have tons of money and user-reported data (like live GPS traces from users' devices) to do decent work, but there are many times that OSM map nerds do a better job. The real issue with OSM is in remote areas where not a lot of people are around on the ground to realize that it's broken or care: the first user in an area often has some volunteer work to do. But fortunately it's easy and you can do it. Any random person can make a better map of their area than Google, instead of having to beg them for it.

Re: Organic Maps

#390

Post by ihatehn »

gniv wrote: post #251
acec wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No not trust it google maps either. There is a crossroads that is wrong in Google near my house and it is right in OSM. In fact... I did fix it but I will not report about the error to Google ;-)

> I did fix it but I will not report about the error to Google Why not? That seems like a weird stance. Is your desire to hurt Google so strong that you are not willing to help potentially thousands of people?

If Google wants to have good updated user-contributed data for free, I hear there's a great open source map they can use ;)
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