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Organic Maps

organicmaps.app

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Re: Organic Maps

#411

Post by vintagedave »

iavael wrote: post #356
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…

> It’s developed in Estonia! It's actually developed by mostly Russian and Belorussian developers who live in Switzerland, New Zealand, Russia, and Belarus. Also, there are some significant contributions from residents of other countries, but none of them are from Estonia. Looks like the only Estonian thing is legal entity for doing business. But nevertheless, I agree that Estonia is remarkable for its IT culture. I…

Thanks for the info. I saw the OÜ and the registered address in Tallinn and thought it was based here. I can’t edit my original comment now unfortunately.

Re: Organic Maps

#412

Post by rurp »

I love the offline focus of this app, but the one killer feature it lacks is the ability to download satellite maps.

One of my most used and loved apps is a hiking app that supports saving different types of maps offline, and I use the satellite views quite a bit.

Re: Organic Maps

#413

Post by technothrasher »

matkoniecz wrote: post #199
technothrasher wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started using StreetComplete a few months ago. It's a good "time waster" when I'm sitting somewhere in my car waiting for somebody, or I'm out for a stroll somewhere. I did laugh though when I was recently in Europe and was filling in data with it, and it kept wanting to know how wide the streets were in meters. I had visions of annoying motorists by putting a tape measure across the streets to get an answer.

There is a separate app to install with VR tool that is capable of measuring it without tape measure :) See https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.westnordost... (initially it was bundled in one app, later it turned out that Google was lying about license of arcore repository, see https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/4289 )

Nice, I'll take a look. Thanks. Though it doesn't seem to want to know street widths here in New England.

Re: Organic Maps

#414

Post by cpmsmith »

KnackeredHues wrote: post #369
ihatehn wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I know that OsmAnd has fairly granular routing preferences, including a "preferred terrain" setting with "hilly", "less hilly", and "flat" options (as well as a "use elevation data" option which I don't quite understand).

Re: Organic Maps

#415

Post by fizwidget »

pete_3c1f wrote: post #216
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 this over Google is that now (If I stay with it) I have a way bigger incentive to contribute to OSM, because there's an app where I can see / use my changes.

I get a kick out of seeing my changes appear in Organic Maps every month or so. Great motivator for contributing to OSM :D

Re: Organic Maps

#416

Post by mpawelski »

euroderf wrote: post #6
dbrgn wrote: post #3

Organic Maps is less powerful than OSMAnd (on Android), but it's much more straightforward and easy to use. It's the go-to app I recommend to all casual map users that want offline maps.

For offline use I've been quite happy with Maps.me (also OSM-based) but it sounds like Organic Maps is worth a try.

Other people have already written that it's a fork of OrganicMaps by original authors.

I'll just add that for me OrganicMaps is much better than current Maps.me which is getting worse and worse after it was sold to some Korean (or Chinese, don't remember now) company.

The UI is much simpler and in recent months you can really start to see that OrganicMaps is becoming more detailed. I used to check from time to time the difference between Maps.me and OM and and it used to not be much of a difference, but now you have: more POIs (point of interests, like physiotherapist, specific kind of shops, etc.), better rendering of walls, fences, cliffs, embankments, hedges, better rendering of parking places (very recent update!), and more!

Re: Organic Maps

#417

Post by samschooler »

oregoncurtis wrote: post #408
zikduruqe wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a cyclist, I use Organic Maps to add drinking water sources, shelters, repair stations, fix biking routes and lanes using just a mobile app to update OSM when I am out and about.

How do you fix the routes? I just checked out the suggested route from my work to home and it doesn't stick to the bike greenways or streets with bikelanes. It actually suggested I take a very dangerous road with no bike traffic at all. How can I help improve that?

A lot of the routing comes down to pressure around the tag `bicycle`. If there is a road illegal to bikes, tag it `bicycle=no`. But if it is unsafe, the best way to fix it is to better document designated routes, as well as cycleways.

OSM's philosophy on routing is you should not try to fix routing by trying to translate your opinion that it is unsafe to ride on the street into to tags. Instead the routing algorithm should improve or the data should improve to the point where an alternative route can be suggested based on data.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bicycle

Re: Organic Maps

#418

Post by janc_ »

lionkor wrote: post #151
dspillett wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not alone. The last time a home internet upgrade felt really significant to me was going from 2mbit to 8mbit. Everything else has been luxury. Though I'll be signing up for ~160 or ~1000 as soon as the new cables the street was recently dug up to put in place are connected, I like my luxuries! I do still notice upstream improvements though. Both those old 2mbit and 8mbit connections were 256kbit up, and I cur…

DSL can usually do up to 250 mbit/s, no?

The engineers who invented DSL did Gbit/s speeds in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, real life 50 year old copper pairs aren't as fast as those in their lab...

Re: Organic Maps

#419

Post by mpawelski »

walteweiss wrote: post #4

Do they have Linux apps as well? There are links to Flathub and the native (repository) app in the bottom of the page.

There is, but the UX is not there yet. I think it was mostly used for for easier development and contributing to the project (you don't have to use mobile emulators to test map rendering), but apparently it's now officially in "beta" state, so maybe there is some hope for better UX improvement in future.

Re: Organic Maps

#420

Post by scatters »

mcv wrote: post #220
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…

Is it that there are more cars? Because I live in Amsterdam, and there's definitely more bikes than cars here, yet bicycle support still sucks. Although it's possible few cyclists use Google Maps because a) it's bad, b) they don't need to, and c) you need a special clip to use your smartphone live on your bike (though that's also true for cars).

Most modern cars have a center console with Android Auto, so you just plug in your phone to USB and it takes over navigation, communication and entertainment.
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