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A community-led fork of Organic Maps

comaps.app

71–80 of 217 posts

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#71
post #55
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Other map apps offer different routes between two points, showing the trade-off in time. Organic Maps calculates one route, and it doesn't matter if it's through a deadly car-congested highway. My example is going from Zürich West to Downtown. Here is my experience: * Organic maps: calculates fast, although through a street with a lot of traffic, no alternatives offered. * OsmAnd: takes 5 seconds on a flagship phone…

Oh, ok, makes sense!

Yeah, getting a nice bike route on OrganicMaps indeed involves some manual app convincing when an obvious bike route exists, I had the exact same thing last week, I agree this could be improved especially given the data is already present in OSM.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#72

I've contributed a few trivial fixes to OrganicMaps and I found them to be pretty responsive and reasonable in their opinions. That doesn't mean I agreed with all the decisions or priorities they make but that's to be expected. Their leadership seemed sane enough to me. It certainly felt like close enough to a BDFL situation to me. In the research I did, OrganicMaps was the only viable open alternative to something l…

> Color me skeptical that a fork will get off the ground

Could be, time will tell us. But it works as expected: people can fork if they want to, users can choose which app they use. Users can even use both OrganicMaps and CoMaps if that's better for them!

I currently use OrganicMaps and OSMAnd in parallel, depending on what I do. Works great!

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#73
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not an UX thing, but I find myself going back to Google Maps to find restaurants, reviews and reliable opening hours all the time. Neither Apple Maps nor Organic Maps offers the same level of quality (not to say that Google Maps reviews can be problematic in themselves).

It's almost impossible for anything to compete with Google Maps on business information because they have built such a vast commercial ecosystem around it with advertising, Maps users etc.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#74
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Impossible in the medium term, unless Organic goes online.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#75
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…

Wow, thanks for mentioning https://streetcomplete.app ! This looks very intuitive to use for edits on openstreetmaps. Would someone here know a similiar tool for iOS or MacOS? Or any recommendations to edit roads. We are currently driving with a 4.5 tonne motorhome in Europe and the road weight and height limits are usually marked properly in osmand+ but when they are not we waste multiple hours rerouting in the alps…

There’s been work put in to making this happen, but now EU have also given funding for it to making it Multiplatform: https://nlnet.nl/project/StreetComplete-multiplatform/

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#76
post #64

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…

> 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! Sure, but I think this is what's happening now. Not because they are selling the company, but apparently one issue is that nobody in the community knows where the donations are going. They (CoMaps) complain about transparency regarding finances. I believe this would be a good r…

Donations are going to Organic Maps company. They have 10+ years of history. Most likely to pay for map server traffic.

Non-profit does not guarantee transparency, look at Mozilla as an example.

This fork is just a bunch of anonymous dudes on internet, who setup PayPal and replaced donate button. Until they do map data hosting, there is not much credibility!

Edit: there are 3th party mirrors for manual download, so I guess they can use those.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#77
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They seem to have some sort of experimental support for GTFS [1], and one important part of Transitous is being a GTFS aggregator, so maybe they are not too far away from being able to use that part of Transitous.

Although it'd probably be good to be able to query Transitous itself when online.

[1] https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/blob/master/docs/...

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#78
post #71
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other map apps offer different routes between two points, showing the trade-off in time. Organic Maps calculates one route, and it doesn't matter if it's through a deadly car-congested highway. My example is going from Zürich West to Downtown. Here is my experience: * Organic maps: calculates fast, although through a street with a lot of traffic, no alternatives offered. * OsmAnd: takes 5 seconds on a flagship phone…

Oh, ok, makes sense! Yeah, getting a nice bike route on OrganicMaps indeed involves some manual app convincing when an obvious bike route exists, I had the exact same thing last week, I agree this could be improved especially given the data is already present in OSM.

Inflexible routing is the reason I'm not using an Organic maps derivative. On OSMAnd I have tweaked the routing algorithm to my taste and it's hard to beat.

There is often construction or other temporary issues, so having on-the-fly rerouting that I can trust is key.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#79
post #55
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Other map apps offer different routes between two points, showing the trade-off in time. Organic Maps calculates one route, and it doesn't matter if it's through a deadly car-congested highway. My example is going from Zürich West to Downtown. Here is my experience: * Organic maps: calculates fast, although through a street with a lot of traffic, no alternatives offered. * OsmAnd: takes 5 seconds on a flagship phone…

Care to try brouter for this route ?

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#80
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…

Wow, thanks for mentioning https://streetcomplete.app ! This looks very intuitive to use for edits on openstreetmaps. Would someone here know a similiar tool for iOS or MacOS? Or any recommendations to edit roads. We are currently driving with a 4.5 tonne motorhome in Europe and the road weight and height limits are usually marked properly in osmand+ but when they are not we waste multiple hours rerouting in the alps…

Mentioning it just in case, but openstreetmap.org's web editor (iD) is a good start on Desktop.

There's also EveryDoor [1] which is very nice to edit OSM and they do seem to have an iOS version. Depending on what you want to edit, it can be very handy.

I have not tried the numerous other, more advanced options [2].

[1] https://every-door.app/

[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editors

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