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A community-led fork of Organic Maps

comaps.app

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Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#41

Post by kmarc »

saubeidl wrote: post #34
kmarc wrote: post #32

Sad to see the current state of mobile OSM-based apps. Maps.me becoming OrganicMaps, now this. Lot of development effort, great work going into it, but somehow, after years, the apps don't feel more user-friendly. I was pushing hard to replace Google Maps, but eventually, I gave up. OsmAnd is great if you need that "swiss army knife of OSM apps" on your phone, but I rarely do. Same with Maps.me/Organic Maps, try to s…

What do you think is the biggest UX issue with maps.me/organic maps/comaps/whatever?

The biggest for me is definitely the lack of public transportation. This is something even gnome-maps support. Global search (eg. things that are not downloaded yet) only works for some bigger entities, that are part of the world map (although I understand that this would need some server-side support). Not having a satellite map is also a bummer.

Point-to-point navigation at places where you already downloaded maps is alright (same with osmand), but for exploration, or public trasnport, I would need to use moovit, mapy, osmand (wikipedia overlay is awesome), or google maps.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#42

Post by kmarc »

maelito wrote: post #36
kmarc wrote: post #32

Sad to see the current state of mobile OSM-based apps. Maps.me becoming OrganicMaps, now this. Lot of development effort, great work going into it, but somehow, after years, the apps don't feel more user-friendly. I was pushing hard to replace Google Maps, but eventually, I gave up. OsmAnd is great if you need that "swiss army knife of OSM apps" on your phone, but I rarely do. Same with Maps.me/Organic Maps, try to s…

> try to search for something, mistype only one letter Photon is quite good at this, coming with english/french/german plug-and-play. But it's online, so very hard to implement on each user's phone, which is the limitation of Organic and Osmand. Once you're using Photon or an equivalent project, you need to do a lot more to provide Google's experience : - itinerary suggestions like "from london to winchester" - coord…

this looks promising, thanks for sharing :-)

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#43

Post by lolinder »

I'm increasingly disaffected by the idea of BDFL-run projects.

The concept is appealing—it's essentially Plato's philosopher king. The BDFL can unstick decision making and ensure the project moves forward without having to litigate every decision in committee, they maintain context and vision throughout the life of the project, and because they're not accountable to anyone they can make the right call for the project rather than having to make complicated political trade-offs. It's all the perks of a monarchy.

Unfortunately, we've seen over and over again that the BDFL model also has all the problems of monarchy. If you get a good one it's the most effective form of government, but people are fickle things. Frequently we see things like this, where the BDFL turns out to have been malevolent after all or decided that they are the project and are entitled to the sole profit from it. WordPress comes to mind.

A good BDFL is worth keeping, but I think we'll find that drawing inspiration for our community structures from real-world democracies/republics will be more stable and reliable in the long term and more generalizable across new projects. Democracies aren't perfect, but by design they smooth out the variance of the individual humans in the community, giving you much more predictable results over time than monarchies do.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#44

Post by kmarc »

maelito wrote: post #38
kmarc wrote: post #32

Sad to see the current state of mobile OSM-based apps. Maps.me becoming OrganicMaps, now this. Lot of development effort, great work going into it, but somehow, after years, the apps don't feel more user-friendly. I was pushing hard to replace Google Maps, but eventually, I gave up. OsmAnd is great if you need that "swiss army knife of OSM apps" on your phone, but I rarely do. Same with Maps.me/Organic Maps, try to s…

> If OsmAnd got a new rendering engine (no, not that "3D" sluggish thing it has for a couple years now), like streetcomplete has (or the Strava-built-in mapbox renderer), it would be possibly the best. What "3D sluggish thing" are talking about ? Streetcomplete, like most OSM vector 3D maps use MapLibre, for a few months now https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/pull/5693 Edit : sorry, I read Organic. Inde…

Yes :-)

Streetcomplete is amazing; I understand it provides less polygons to render but it does an absolutely amazing job at it, even when there are thousands of quests.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#45

Post by maelito »

kmarc wrote: post #44
maelito wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If OsmAnd got a new rendering engine (no, not that "3D" sluggish thing it has for a couple years now), like streetcomplete has (or the Strava-built-in mapbox renderer), it would be possibly the best. What "3D sluggish thing" are talking about ? Streetcomplete, like most OSM vector 3D maps use MapLibre, for a few months now https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/pull/5693 Edit : sorry, I read Organic. Inde…

Yes :-) Streetcomplete is amazing; I understand it provides less polygons to render but it does an absolutely amazing job at it, even when there are thousands of quests.

Yes, zooming in is so fast. I'd love to have this experience on mobile Web, we're not quite there yet. I suppose WebGPU is needed ?

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#46

Post by throw738384 »

I would add a few points:

* Organic Maps devs are from Belarus, company is registered in Estonia. This is very difficult setup already, and I can imagine authors just want simplest setup possible. Perhaps they do not want to waste energy on nonprofit that is very very difficult and expensive to do internationally!

* If they sell the company so what? Create another fork and move on. It is opensource, but that does not mean authors can not get some money!

* Biggest expense for Organic Maps is hosting and mirroring map data. Is this fork going to use (and pay) their own servers?

* Is there list of developers and contributors behind this fork? I only found "us" and "we" and "community"!

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#47

Post by jraph »

kmarc wrote: post #32

Sad to see the current state of mobile OSM-based apps. Maps.me becoming OrganicMaps, now this. Lot of development effort, great work going into it, but somehow, after years, the apps don't feel more user-friendly. I was pushing hard to replace Google Maps, but eventually, I gave up. OsmAnd is great if you need that "swiss army knife of OSM apps" on your phone, but I rarely do. Same with Maps.me/Organic Maps, try to s…

> Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it.

What do you mean? It's possible to add intermediate stops to shape your route. Or do you mean something else?

With you on the search not being forgiving enough.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#48

Post by RetroTechie »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #13

Why do people contribute to Organic Maps and not to OSM? I always assumed that Organic Maps was a sophisticated way to distribute OSM data, nothing more.

You need both: the map data (OSM project), and software for viewing/using it.

Ideally any app using OSM data would enable contributing to the underlaying map data. But that's probably not how it works.

For what it's worth: I like Organic Maps for being more lightweight, quicker rendering & simpler configuration than OSMand. But it (still? haven't used in a while) does lack some useful features like points of interest (supermarkets, gas stations & such).

Would be nice if it were easy to share (offline) map data between apps. Download in app A, backup on sd card , use from app B, C, D, or on other device by swap/copy sd card. Maybe it's possible, but I haven't figured out how (on Android). At least it's not easy/obvious/automatic.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#49

Post by saubeidl »

kmarc wrote: post #41
saubeidl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think is the biggest UX issue with maps.me/organic maps/comaps/whatever?

The biggest for me is definitely the lack of public transportation. This is something even gnome-maps support. Global search (eg. things that are not downloaded yet) only works for some bigger entities, that are part of the world map (although I understand that this would need some server-side support). Not having a satellite map is also a bummer. Point-to-point navigation at places where you already downloaded maps…

Oh that's a great callout. I did some quick research and it appears Gnome's public transport feature is powered by https://transitous.org/ - I wonder how much work it would be to add this to Organic Maps?

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#50

Post by gus_massa »

lolinder wrote: post #43

I'm increasingly disaffected by the idea of BDFL-run projects. The concept is appealing—it's essentially Plato's philosopher king. The BDFL can unstick decision making and ensure the project moves forward without having to litigate every decision in committee, they maintain context and vision throughout the life of the project, and because they're not accountable to anyone they can make the right call for the project…

You can't fork a country, but you can fork a open source project. Remember to not sign an CLA that gives superpowers to the current BDFL.

So it's more like herding cats instead of nuking everyone that decides to ignore the presidencial orders or not paying taxes.

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