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OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps

blog.firedrake.org

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Re: OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps

#71

Post by pferde »

risico wrote: post #67
pferde wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that's country-specific. Over here, Google Maps has woefully outdated business info, apart from big names like McDonald or Starbucks. And I'm not even talking about building shapes, sidewalks, paths, or even roads. Meanwhile in OSM, everything is much more detailed and kept up to date. I know, because I'm a mapper myself, and help keep it that way. Google Maps seem like just another ad platform, for companies…

> Google Maps seem like just another ad platform, for companies to pay if they want to be shown in higher zoom levels. I know, mostly that's my pet peeve as well and I guess I got trained to see through the noise. It is the last Google product that I am struggling to get rid off. > I guess that's country-specific. Over here, Where is that? I am slowly trying to get move to OSM backed apps and hoping to put in the eff…

I'm in one of Europe's slightly less developed countries.

And I can only recommend getting into mapping as a hobby. It got me to discover parts of my own city and region I've completely overlooked despite living there for decades, and gave me reasons to get out more.

I just wish it was easier to edit the map on mobile, but alas, nothing beats big desktop screen with a good editor and a precise input method. Mobile screens are small, and my fingers are fat. :)

Re: OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps

#72

Post by pferde »

koyote wrote: post #33
pferde wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that's country-specific. Over here, Google Maps has woefully outdated business info, apart from big names like McDonald or Starbucks. And I'm not even talking about building shapes, sidewalks, paths, or even roads. Meanwhile in OSM, everything is much more detailed and kept up to date. I know, because I'm a mapper myself, and help keep it that way. Google Maps seem like just another ad platform, for companies…

Just so I know for future travels: where is this and what do you use instead? So far I have seen Google Maps be pretty useless in parts of Asia with their own software infrastructure (e.g. Korea or Japan) but it's been very useful in most Western countries.

One of Europe's less developed countries.

An app to use that is closest to Google Maps experience is probably Mapy.com. It has decent navigation capability for cars, bikes and pedestrians, both in and out of cities, and slick UI.

Also worth trying is CoMaps, OsmAnd or Locus Maps.

Re: OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps

#73

Post by kivle »

nine_k wrote: post #15
charlie-83 wrote: post #7

An important thing to mention is that OSMAnd has multiple (somewhat confusing) paid tiers. Since its FOSS you can presumably just compile it yourself if you wanted to bypass the paywall (the ethics of this are left as an exercise for the reader). However, Android Auto support is behind the paywall and Android Auto only works with apps downloaded from the play store. OSMAnd definitely has more features (especially wit…

I frankly don't see any trouble in paying for open-source software once . I see it as a way to support the development. I often buy "premium" versions even if they add nothing on top of the OSS version. As of OSMAnd, $40 might look like a steep price even for a lifetime unlimited license, but they regularly run sales where the same costs $25.

Even if you buy it, they will still constantly nag for you to get their subscription service. And they arbitrarily lock most new features behind it, like 3D views and such.

Re: OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps

#74

Post by lmm »

globular-toast wrote: post #65
lmm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the behaviour is great if you're using markers only as short-term working "notes" and always ticking them off when you're done (use favourites for places you want to save longer-term). But yeah the marker feature doesn't explain how it wants you to use it.

I use the markers to loosely transcribe walking routes from books or the web then tick them off during my walk. I was always curious if this is what they're actually designed for, though.

I use them for Audax checkpoints, but given how they work and their iconography I suspect they're primarily for orienteering.

Re: OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps

#75

Post by pbmonster »

jraph wrote: post #66
pbmonster wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how many hidden magic search strings like this there are This drives me insane. I often use OSM for things like "show me all sources of drinking water along this route". But you need the magic key word. In this case, it's certainly not "drinking water (food) and not "drinking water (tourism)". It's also not "water tab (service)". "Fountain" works mostly OK (since fountain water must be labeled as non potab…

For water specifically, it works well on CoMaps / Organic Maps (search > categories > water). It's too bad we don't have a convenient UI for desktop. OSM has to be the only thing that's more convenient to use on mobile for no good technical reasons. Just nobody has done it yet.

> Maps (search > categories > water)

For my home town, that displays historic wells (deep, dry, no bucket, barred and locked) but not the little tab in the sandbox of the playground and not the public restroom in the center.

So on first sight it's less useful than "fountain". But I'll play around with it on my next tour.

Re: OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps

#76

Post by dvdkon »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #27

I couldn’t make heads or tails of how to navigate with OSMAnd until thumbing through GitHub issues and finding out about https://opensupermaps.com/ which, after importing a few gigabytes of text files, allows general search of street addresses - not a great learning curve for adoption! What I’d really like to do is copy the old school car GPS interface of, select state, select city, select street, house number, where…

Maybe it depends on regional data availability, but here in the Czech Republic, that's mostly how search in OSMAnd works: You search for a town, then a street, then a house number. I don't know why it only works for you after importing third-party data.

Re: OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps

#77

Post by dvdkon »

pbsurf wrote: post #24

I've been building https://github.com/styluslabs/maps with support for 3D terrain, custom layers, and plugins for search and routing. Vector tiles are generated and served on-demand by https://github.com/styluslabs/geodesk-tiles so there's no need to download an entire country or region first.

A new maps app and a revival of Tangram ES from the developer of my favourite note taking app, I'm glad I checked this comments section :)

And I see you open-sourced Write, thanks!

Re: OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps

#78

Post by jraph »

pbmonster wrote: post #75
jraph wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For water specifically, it works well on CoMaps / Organic Maps (search > categories > water). It's too bad we don't have a convenient UI for desktop. OSM has to be the only thing that's more convenient to use on mobile for no good technical reasons. Just nobody has done it yet.

> Maps (search > categories > water) For my home town, that displays historic wells (deep, dry, no bucket, barred and locked) but not the little tab in the sandbox of the playground and not the public restroom in the center. So on first sight it's less useful than "fountain". But I'll play around with it on my next tour.

It'd be worth checking if these nodes are actually correctly mapped. For instance, historical wells that are dry, locked, etc should probably not be labeled with amenity=drinking_water. And the missing one should probably be updated to have it.

More on this at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Ddrinking_w...

In case you don't already know this and for others, you can use the editor at https://osm.org or the Every Door app on your mobile phone during your next tour for this (you'll need an OSM account to edit the map).

I'm not 100% sure the CoMaps "Water" category uses amenity:drinking_water, but I have relied on it for this many times during bike tours or hikes without much surprise :-)

Re: OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps

#79

Post by mnmalst »

stevage wrote: post #22

I use Osmand a lot. It work well, but I dearly wish they'd improve some UX issues. I always seem to have the map telling me how far it is to some temporary marker I placed months ago that I can't easily work out how to remove. Also any time I do navigation, the Trip Recording plugin pops up as a sticky system notification even when I haven't enabled trip recording. But the offline navigation is a killer feature, and…

You can disable the notification. Took me a while to find this as well.

Menu > Plugins > Trip Recording > Settings > Notification (Second to last option)

Re: OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps

#80

Post by pbmonster »

jraph wrote: post #78
pbmonster wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maps (search > categories > water) For my home town, that displays historic wells (deep, dry, no bucket, barred and locked) but not the little tab in the sandbox of the playground and not the public restroom in the center. So on first sight it's less useful than "fountain". But I'll play around with it on my next tour.

It'd be worth checking if these nodes are actually correctly mapped. For instance, historical wells that are dry, locked, etc should probably not be labeled with amenity=drinking_water. And the missing one should probably be updated to have it. More on this at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Ddrinking_w... In case you don't already know this and for others, you can use the editor at https://osm.org o…

> I'm not 100% sure the CoMaps "Water" category uses amenity:drinking_water, but I have relied on it for this many times during bike tours or hikes without much surprise

Is there a way to search for the "amenity:drinking_water" tag directly in OSMand or CoMaps (or any other app)? Because this would probably fix everything.

In the end, the apps suffer from the complexity of the underlying data. It probably wasn't a good idea to have drinking water (tourism), drinking water (store) and drinking water (man made), fountain, water tab, well, ... and probably a dozen different categories for map makers to chose from.

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