11 ms·

Switch to OpenStreetMap

• andridk 7y ago
  As a consumer, I was just looking for mobile apps. I couldn't find any on this page. Are there any?
  • mkj 7y ago
    Osmand for Android is pretty good, they should promote it.
    • lallysingh 7y ago
      Is there anything that renders the mapps prettier? The difference between osmand and Google maps is jarring.
      • enriquto 7y ago
        What do you find ugly about them? I actually prefer them to google maps! Also, the naming of the streets is often clearer (in google maps, there are too many streets without name, even if you zoom on them). The overall user interface, however, is often much clearer in the google app.
        • kristofferR 7y ago
          It looks like a satnav from the early '00s... No subtlety in the colors at all. Mapbox Streets is an example of good map design: https://www.mapbox.com/maps/streets/ https://www.mapbox.com/maps/streets/
          • nathancahill 7y ago
            Mapbox is built on OSM data and has pretty nice styling. Gaia GPS is one app that provides (among many other things) Mapbox layers on iOS and Android.
            • kristofferR 7y ago
              Hehe, I had just edited my comment to mention Mapbox, then I noticed your reply. :)
          • iggldiggl 7y ago
            > Mapbox Streets is an example of good map design: https://www.mapbox.com/maps/streets/ https://www.mapbox.com/maps/streets/ Hmm, doesn't show forests and doesn't show built-up areas, either, which are precisely the things I really dislike about Google's map design, too.
        • chrisseaton 7y ago
          Looks like a cheap old satnav!
          • enriquto 7y ago
            I like this aesthetics. The google colors for maps look sad and bland to me.
        • lallysingh 7y ago
          There's no hierarchy in the coloring. Everything is big and bold and it takes more effort to find the parts I care about. The POI icons are huge. The text for obvious things ("New York City" when I'm staring at just Manhattan) is huge and unnecessary. There are too many shown at the street level. Every block has restaurants and bus stops. They're not labeled, just taking up a huge amount of space. It feels like an old linux desktop, before they got usable. The map is covered in visual clutter that takes too much effort to visually process. I agree that Google Maps needs more street names, but that's my only complaint about the map. That's an easy fix.
      • out_of_protocol 7y ago
        Maps.me looks better, faster but don't have as much features
      • MayeulC 7y ago
        I quite like OSMand's look: much more information, and quite easy to pick features apart. But you can also switch the map style inside the app itself. Navigation is modal in OSMand (you can define your own modes, as well as use the predefined ones), so you can for instance have a hiking mode with a topographic view, or a car mode that hides finer details like trees and cycleways.
      • ce4 7y ago
        You can change the map style if you want to. Settings, configure map, map style. You even can create your own style xml i think.
      • puPoh 7y ago
        Prettier? They are much more clear, detailed and readable than Google maps.
  • shameempk 7y ago
    Maps.me is a good alternative to Osmand. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mapswithme.maps.pro https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mapswithme...
    • skinnyasianboi 7y ago
      It's the other way around :) osmand is a good alternative for maps.me because maps.me doesn't care about your privacy and has 20 privacy tracker dependencies installed(check out the exodus privacy app). osmand has zero
      • Mediterraneo10 7y ago
        As mentioned elsewhere, F-Droid hosts a version of Maps.me that is ad- and tracker-free.
  • markosaric 7y ago
    I've been using OsmAnd+ on F-droid (Android). It's great and has many options. Everything works offline. It takes a bit of time to get used to it coming from Google Maps but it's worth a try. Search has been improving recently but still lacks behind Google. Public transport and reviews are missing too.
  • mtmail 7y ago
    There are many. I guess the switch2org authors didn't want to copy https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Software/Mobile https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Software/Mobile https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iOS_applications https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iOS_applic... https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Android_applications https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Android_ap...
• nathancahill 7y ago
  Timely. Just started a project to document Bosnia and Hercegovina's remaining minefields on OSM. The build system consumes PDFs from the European Union Force as they are updated, georeferences them and pushes the features to OSM. Many tile sets on live maps are updated within the week!
  • teekert 7y ago
    Do you have a website or are the mines (or minefields) already in osm(and)?
    • nathancahill 7y ago
      There are a few on OSM, maybe 5%. Don't have website since it's just a one man effort, basically a cron job that runs nightly on a server. Might spin up a little website with docs/information.
      • teekert 7y ago
        Nice, maybe a link to a location where the mines are? I think this is great initiative that makes the world safer. Edit: I'm now on some NSA list, aren't I? Hi guys! Just finished Snowden's book, it was great!
        • nathancahill 7y ago
          Here's the raw PDFs before georeferencing: http://www.euforbih.org/eufor/index.php/bih-minefield-maps http://www.euforbih.org/eufor/index.php/bih-minefield-maps Here's an example mine area: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/627538334#map=17/44.32936/16.33294 https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/627538334#map=17/44.32936/...
          • teekert 7y ago
            Very cool, thanx.
          • 7y ago
• dastx 7y ago
  I've tried over and over again to switch to OSM but everytime I've reverted back to Google Maps and Citymapper. I've even contributed to OSM to fix bits I'm around but it's hard. I don't drive so I rely heavily on public transport, and so for me that's the biggest selling point for any such tool. Unfortunately I've yet to find an OSM app that can do this in a useful manner as Citmapper and Google do. Unfortunately the data is just not there, and when looking through the issues of AndOSM, it feels there is a lot the developers just don't want to bother implementing (and in one scenario, someone had raised a PR but they refused to merge it). Granted, some issues are due to licensing, but many are quite important from a usability point of view. It's been a while since I last time tried AndOSM, or OSM on it's own for that matter, so unfortunately I can't remember the specific cases.
  • svacko 7y ago
    have you tried OsmAnd https://osmand.net/ https://osmand.net/? I'm using it for years, travelling around the world when i need to have offline maps with me and it works good most of the time. I'm not saying it's the best and the fastest map, but it helped me tons of time to find an A-> B route - being a pedestrian, a cyclist or travelling by a public transport
    • Rudism 7y ago
      The biggest drawback for me (coming from someone who exclusively uses OsmAnd for nav) is the lack of geocoding. I can't just type in an address and get a reliable destination pin to navigate to, instead I have to paste the address into a website that will convert it to lat/long first and then use that to drop the pin. That's the main issue that prevents me from recommending OsmAnd to people like my wife who are happy using Google or Apple and unwilling to compromise for the sake of principle.
      • tuukkah 7y ago
        OsmAnd does provide geocoding, but perhaps the address data has been lacking in the areas where you tried it?
      • 7y ago
• joegreen 7y ago
  Highly upvoted article about drawbacks of OSM. I think it's worth mentioning here to give another perspective https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394604
• tomrod 7y ago
  I just switched my non-profit to OSM (and the route-enabled OSRM). We are loving the ability to host our own servers internally, a requirement from our data providers.
• neves 7y ago
  How can I, as sole map user, can help Open Street Map to thrive?
  • lukeqsee 7y ago
    - Make sure your town/region is really good. - Participate in mapathons (through HOT or local chapters of OSM) - Join your local OSM chapter (usually a national organization)
  • kylegordon 7y ago
    I find StreetComplete to be a handy tool on the phone that lets you enrich OSM data https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete
    • Tomte 7y ago
      StreetComplete is fantastic, alas there's no iOS version. And after a while getting used to it you may want to configure the "questions" StreetComplete asks you. Better not answer every type of question than get discouraged or fed up with the umpteenth "is there street lighting?". Of course, if you can stomach being bombarded with questions every few meters, more power to you!
      • mwexler 7y ago
        For iOS, I've been using Go Map!! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/go-map/id592990211 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/go-map/id592990211 Not as nice as StreetComplete but adequate to add some additional data where needed while on the go.
      • skyfaller 7y ago
        One category of questions I have turned off in StreetComplete is questions about wheelchair accessibility. Since I am not a wheelchair user, I have low confidence that I can identify potential problems for them. Like, obviously stairs are not accessible, but e.g. are the doorways wide enough? I also turned off speed limits since it has a warning that you need to check the entire road, not just the highlighted spot.
• lukeqsee 7y ago
  Tangentially, I’ve been trying to get my company on the list of providers for upwards of 6 months to a year, and my MR and Issue in GitHub have not had any movement. Anyone here know someone who could help resolve that? We pretty clearly fit the guidelines for inclusion.
  • Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
    The github-hosted site has only just gone live and the issue backlog hasn't been addressed yet. It'll be looked at in due course I'm sure. (Have to admit I wouldn't have chosen to submit s2o to HN until stuff's been ironed out, but there you go!)
    • lukeqsee 7y ago
      Thanks! I certainly appreciate the work that’s gone into it and the new design/strategy is an excellent improvement.
• mtmail 7y ago
  Very recent relaunch. Their github repo if you want to contribute https://github.com/switch2osm/switch2osm.github.io https://github.com/switch2osm/switch2osm.github.io
• moksly 7y ago
  Has bug-correcting editing improved over the years? We use OSM quite a bit in the public sector because they aren’t snooping. Three years ago one of our internal routing systems broke because someone had reported the street leading up to our administration center as a one-way street in the wrong direction. This meant our 7000 employees couldn’t get compensation for any work related driving, and we couldn’t submit the correct tax-records. When I submitted my correct edit, I was banned because my account was new and I had submitted a evidence from our internal street planning system, where we mapped the direction of the street, which is proprietary to us. Heh, it took two weeks to get it fixed after that because every subsequent edit got denied. Which felt kind of silly, considering it was my department who decided the street should become a one way street in the first place. Really needed a “verified” account system. Considering I haven’t needed to correct anything since is a testament to its quality though.
  • ce4 7y ago
    Couldn't you have just tried contacting the editor who reversed your edit? I have had only one issue ever since (effed up a public transport relation - that got sorted out by mail, and now we're friends in real life), but my account is also almost a decade old now.
  • Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
    Puzzled by this. It's really really unlikely that you got a ban for one editing error. You can see the list of blocks at https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks and actual bans are only imposed for _repeated_ vandalism, edit-warring or copyright infringement. Short-term user blocks are generally imposed if the user isn't responding to attempts to contact them. Do you have a link for your changeset and what happened?
    • ltc5505 7y ago
      Wow, the documents for the user blocks are very thorough. Here is a fun snippet that (blocked) user sorein sent to the OSM Data Working Group: "YOU MORON WHO PROMISED T INTERMEDIATE BETWEEN ME AND THE GYPSIES TAKING OVER IN THE ROMANIAN NEWSLETTER, AND THEN YOU JUST RUDELY FORGOT NEED TO STOP!!! GO DO A JOB FOR WHICH YOU ARTE QUALIFIED"
• samcrawford 7y ago
  I've been using OSM data for a side project I've been working on (an app to find "green" running routes, avoiding busy roads and preferring trails/rivers/parks, and optionally meeting some minimum target distance). It just would not have been possible without OSM's data, full stop. The tag data associated with each road ("way" in OSM parlance) is invaluable, as is the ability to work with all of this information on a planet-scale in a single database (I use osm2pgsql to import the whole planet into a single box with 256GB RAM, and have plenty of headroom to run my app on top of that too). The APIs provided by Google Maps and Apple Maps do not provide the functionality I want, even if I could pay their massive fees. Additionally, Google Maps' mapping of trails is much worse in my experience. Whilst the data is far from perfect in some areas, I am still extremely grateful that OSM exists, and will now make a donation via https://donate.openstreetmap.org/ https://donate.openstreetmap.org/
  • carstenhag 7y ago
    Not sure if you already know this, but you could also use data on whether the streets are lit or not. OSMAnd uses this for example
    • samcrawford 7y ago
      Funnily enough, that is one of the features it already supports (avoiding unlit streets). Another one is avoiding especially hilly routes.
      • asdf21 7y ago
        Is "hilly" a simple binary indicator on each street (or section of road) or is there an entire layer of elevation data included in the world data?
        • samcrawford 7y ago
          In my app, yes, it's a binary flag. But in the underlying data you can get detailed elevation data for every section of road worldwide that is readily usable in open source routing engines. GraphHopper supports STRM and CGIAR (two different data elevation data sources, available globally and free to use).
• ComodoHacker 7y ago
  With all due respect to OSM, isn't "the world’s best map data" an exaggeration? Especially if we count satellite images as map data.
  • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Best is one of those loose terms that works well for marketing - it could be best because it's the largest set that's free-gratis & free-libre, for example. Did you have a "best" in mind. I'd definitely not consider plain satellite imagery to be map data.
  • adrianN 7y ago
    I found OSM to be better than the competition for hiking (it has more trails mapped) and walking in cities (pedestrian only shortcuts are well mapped).
  • freehunter 7y ago
    Satellite images don't work as maps simply because trees exist. I grew up in a national forest and looking at satellite images you'd never know my road existed, or all the roads that connect into it. The trees make a canopy over the road and it's impossible to tell there's anything under them. Same problem with rivers... a lot of rivers show up the same color as the forest on satellite images so you'd never know there was a river there even if you can "see" the water. Depending on the angle of the satellite, this problem exists in large cities as well. Roads are obscured by skyscrapers even at the slightest angle, and roads disappear from the picture without telling you if they went underground into tunnels or just ended. Now, satellite pictures overlaid with map data, that works. But just satellite pictures by themselves isn't enough to navigate.
  • Piskvorrr 7y ago
    Satellite (you probably mean "aerial", commercially avaliable satellite imagery just doesn't have enough resolution) is perhaps map imagery, a supplementary source for maps; but not map data at all: maps are an interpretation of the world, imagery is "just" raw pictures. For example, my city gets aerial imagery taken ~yearly, with resolution better than 1 ft/px. This is very precise, and the updates are frequent; yet, still insufficient to answer typical mapping questions, such as "can I get there from here, using this vehicle?" That's what a map should be able to answer: both map and aerial image can tell you "there is a vehicular track", but only the map will tell you "and it's private, and even if you don't care for signs, this gate over here is locked, so no, this does not route; you can't go over that road here, as it has a bollard in the middle; that bridge is too flimsy for you; that street is one-way but opposite; you need to go that way, but there's toll collected; otherwise, there's a lengthy detour." Only some of these features can be inferred from an image. (Of course, the map needs to be kept up-to-date with all this data, but that's a very different story)
• have_faith 7y ago
  I recently looked into using OSM for a side project and after going down a rabbit hole of researching 3rd party tools for generating (vector) tile sets and how to setup a tile server I eventually gave up (my mapping knowledge is limited to using Google Maps through their JS API). Can anyone point me in the direction of a more complete resource/tutorial that would help? Eager to get back on it at some point. I clicked "Use an all-in-one solution" on the Serving Tiles page but it 404'd.
  • samcrawford 7y ago
    I don't have experience of generating vector tiles myself, but I do have a lot of experience with osm2pgsql and PostGIS now. From a quick look around, https://sparkgeo.com/blog/vector-tile-server-using-postgis/ https://sparkgeo.com/blog/vector-tile-server-using-postgis/ looks quite accessible, but glosses over how to use them in the frontend.
  • yohannparis 7y ago
    If you do not want to go down the rabbit hole, then Mapbox.com is the best to start, and you can slowly learn the difference between layers, tiles, vectorial, and their JS API is one of the best in the market. Then once you are comfortable, move to Leaflet, while keeping Mapbox tile service, and then build your own.
  • durkie 7y ago
    How about something like Tegola? https://tegola.io/ https://tegola.io/
  • dvdkon 7y ago
    As said already, hosting your own tile server isn't really an alternative to a service like Google Maps. I'd like to add that there are multiple such services listed on the "Providers" page of switch2osm, though I'd argue that they should be featured more prominently. I recommend MapTiler, as I've used their open source backend on a project once.
• grecy 7y ago
  For anyone that doesn't know, it's trivial to load OSM onto a Garmin GPS and use is for turn-by-turn navigation, for free. I've used it in over 40 countries (including Africa, Europe, North America) and it is staggeringly complete and accurate. From the mega capital cities to the tiniest village, it has every single dirt track, school, hospital, gas station, roundabout, intersection, etc. etc. I can count on one hand the number of times it hasn't been utterly perfect in 4 years of driving around 90,000 miles through 40 countries. I have no idea how the maps can be so shockingly good in rural Ivory Coast or Burundi, but they are.
  • boboguitar 7y ago
    Do you know if there's a way to do this with built in garmin navigation in cars?
    • grecy 7y ago
      If the Garmin in your dash has a memory card slot, or someway to update the maps, then likely yes.
      • boboguitar 7y ago
        Awesome will have to do some investigation.
      • kube-system 7y ago
        Eh, I wouldn't be so sure there. Not sure if Garmin OEM stuff is any different, but many factory head units only load maps signed by the manufacturer.
  • anticodon 7y ago
    Some countries are mapped poorly in OSM. Examples are: Mongolia and Cambodia. Many roads and buildings are missing.
    • grecy 7y ago
• diftraku 7y ago
  It's very unfortunate the site does not have a clear path for caching pre-rendered tiles (from OSM.org for example). The only real choices you have are either the ones from leaflet-provider or rolling your own render server. For something like having a single country at couple decent zoom-levels, I would rather not go through the trouble of setting up a complete render pipeline when pre-rendered tiles that are cached and hosted locally would suffice.
  • Piskvorrr 7y ago
    As someone who went that route previously: "there are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and whatever." That one will bite you - at best, if your tile provider allows you to "scrape" their tiles, you'll get inconsistent data. It only goes downhill from there :(
• ajsnigrutin 7y ago
  Ok.. i want to serve tiles... ok, I go here: https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/ https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/ First option (Build a tile server using packages) ... i click on it.. ubuntu packages... i don't have ubuntu here, let's go back. Second option (Build a tile server from source), takes me here: https://switch2osm.org/?page_id=76 https://switch2osm.org/?page_id=76 ... where is the documentation? How do i build it from source? Ok fsck it, let's try the "all in one solution"... https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/using-an-all-in-one-solution/ https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/using-an-all-in-one-sol... ... "Page not found" So.. either install ubuntu, or figure it out by myself?
  • puPoh 7y ago
    You are complaining that a FREE service that provides you with content while also respecting your privacy is not good enough for you.
    • machello13 7y ago
      He's complaining that the website seems to be either broken or missing necessary information. He's allowed to complain about that.
      • puPoh 7y ago
        Allowed by who? I'm not talking about being prohibited to do so.
        • setr 7y ago
          allowed by morals and similar metrics for "justified complaining"
        • matkoniecz 7y ago
          Such complaints are very useful! I am one of people involved in OSM and added this thread to my TODO to look for easy-to-fix problems.
  • 7y ago
• bambax 7y ago
  A few years ago I did make my own tiles for Paris from OSM; it's pretty exciting to be able to design everything. But it's a lot of work that has to be redone constantly to keep up with map changes... Not realistic for a small organization (or an individual!) unfortunately.
  • Angusscript 7y ago
    yeah, I've worked on something similar some time ago for a small business, the recourses we put in that was not worth it as we had to redo the thing quite soon.
  • Piskvorrr 7y ago
    Oh, it's fairly realistic for an individual with `cron`, no worries. But the up-front setup is still nontrivial, and running a server costs at least power, if not system administration time.
    • bambax 7y ago
      In theory you could automate generating the tiles, but you can't really automate downloading the dataset; it's enormous (hundreds of Go IIRC) and most of the time has to be checked by hand.
      • Piskvorrr 7y ago
        Depends on the coverage. If you wish to serve the entire world, it is indeed massive (~100 GB indeed); but from my experience, the updates are 1.automated and, more importantly, 2.incremental. Perhaps the technology has advanced since you tried it... (How do you even check 100 GB of data by hand? That seems impossible.) That said, I am using the dataset for generating a map, but I'm only using a country extract - which only goes up to some hundreds of MB, and updates on the order of tens of kilobytes. Far more manageable.
• davidmurdoch 7y ago
  I evaluated OSM for an AR real-world strategy game (like pokemon go) I was building years ago (terramango.com), as implementing it would have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. Problem with it in the US is that so many places don't have parcel boundaries, and if they do, they are often pretty far off from reality. We ended up using Google Maps (cost wasn't an issue yet because we were only in a private beta stage) and negotiated a limited free trial for parcel data from a private supplier. The private supplier scrapes county records (some of which are only available in person, and other countries charge a fee for access) and their records almost always lined up with Google's parcel boundaries, OSM did not. Other countries I randomly spot checked did seem to have great OSM records though.
  • asdf21 7y ago
    OSM should be big enough to scrape their own parcels / subscribe to someone who does at this point. I wonder if this is still an issue... AR RTS is my use case as well, and the mapping is obviously a huge component. I think Pokemon Go switched to OSM a couple years ago, didn't they?
    • davidmurdoch 7y ago
      Pokemon Go doesn't need individual parcel data the way we did. They only needed a few points of interest (lat, lng), whereas we needed geometry data for every parcel with a building on it.
    • rmc 7y ago
      > OSM should be big enough to scrape their own parcels / subscribe to someone who does at this point. You do realise OSM runs on like £50,000 per year, and has basically sorta one employee? it's not that big!
• johannes1234321 7y ago
  I love using OSM, but when pointing non-geeks towards it the experience of openstreetmap.org is not the best. Myself I am a happy user of maps.me as an app (even paying user before they were acquired) and have built tons of toy tools around it (basically whenever I need to do a tech demo I use osm data queried from overpass etc.) and there are cool things one can do ... but the shiny user-friendly thing is missing and "don't give Google your data" for many doesn't work. Edit/p.s. I know that openstreetmap.org is supposed to be the "developer site" and others are supposed to build the "nice" products, but it's the entry to the project, where the brand leads.
• ocodia 7y ago
  I wish you could just download a big bunch of pre-rendered tiles for each country.
  • lucb1e 7y ago
    If you're willing to pay for the incurred server cost, I'm sure MapBox doesn't mind if you download tiles based on OSM data from them. Or build your own from planet.osm (that's a file, not a domain (it's hard to tell these days)).
  • sp8962 7y ago
    a) there are more than enough companies that would be willing to provide that as a service. Any larger country will simply be very big depending on the maximum zoom level (there is a reason why most tile service providers don't pre-render high zoom levels), b) the more sensible approach would be to use pre-generated vector tiles, for example from https://openmaptiles.org/ https://openmaptiles.org/
    • ryantgtg 7y ago
      We switched last year from the Google Maps API to hosting our own pre-generated vector tiles from Open Map Tiles in a docker image (using the mapbox api, and we're hosted somewhere in aws (not my expertise there - I get lost in the acronyms)). It seems to strike a good balance of managing costs + controlling our own stuff while relieving us of the burden of generating our own vector tiles. I could not find great docs on generating them ourselves, and as a newbie to that world I quickly gave up. Now we just have to periodically take a fresh pull of the tile package, so our tiles aren't too out of date.
• omnibrain 7y ago
  While I managed to set up a tile server in the past, I found it nearly impossible to find concise information on how to setup all the rest. Especially the geocoding part to convert addresses to points on the map/geo coordinates, or something like the search box on openstreetmap.org. Holding the map information up to date was another topic...
• jillesvangurp 7y ago
  There are also some nice services using OSM data. E.g. one of my friends runs the opencage geocoder which uses open data. Also there's at least one good navigation product out there (graphhopper) that I know about. There are several companies providing map tiles. And depending on what country you are in, OSM data may actually be superior. E.g. OSM data in Germany is ridiculously detailed compared to just about everything else. Lots of slums have detailed OSM maps when most other provider just show a blank space. If you stare a lot at maps for the Bay area, this is about as good as it gets for e.g. Google and Apple maps. Don't assume you get the same level of detail everywhere. Making maps is complicated and expensive. OSM is pretty competitive in many places and the best there is in quite a few other places. And if that's not the case, the locals can fix it, if they want to.
• EGreg 7y ago
  Ok how do I use OSM to calculate routes?
  • samcrawford 7y ago
    You need a routing engine on top of the OSM data. Common projects that do this are GraphHopper, Openrouteservice, OSRM and pgRouting. I use Graphhopper and Openrouteservice - both are very actively maintained.
  • why-oh-why 7y ago
    The Maps.me iPhone app has turn by turn navigation
• zwieback 7y ago
  Hadn't looked at OSM in a while - wow the maps are gorgeous. Remind me of the topo maps I grew up with in Germany, which are basically pieces of art.
• ragebol 7y ago
  Does anyone know of a OSM tileserver running on IPFS?
• jokoon 7y ago
  The OSM initiative is fantastic, but only the data is good. The software around it is low-quality, and the documentation is not good enough. I once managed to import data exports I found on geofabrik and load it into a spatialite database. It was not very complicated but it was difficult to find help to understand what I was doing. But doing it felt pretty good. I still have to test if what I loaded actually works though. Other experience I had, trying to load vector tiles from mapbox, with the PBF (google protocol buffers) format, in C++. I swiftly gave up. The C++ header generated was gigantic, apparently those .mbtiles were zipped PBF in a sqlite or something like that. It was horrendous. Mapbox seems like good software (and we need alternative to google maps) but I don't think they help OSM at all, at least not with the OSM model. So in short, OSM needs some skilled engineers to work on the formats they can encourage. GIS is not a simple subject, and I wish there was more good FOSS for it. Cheers to the OSMand team who can let me browse my region on my 70 euros android without a data plan, for free! That's a lot of money saved. No doubt I will use OSM data to generate a 3D view of the world, so I can make a game with it. Outerra did it (they also made incredible city renders I think), but they are not planning to release a game, what a shame!
  • hoseja 7y ago
    Do you have any recommendation for displaying vector maps in C++ (native program, not web)? The whole field seems very confusing.
    • jokoon 7y ago
      Not at all, I don't. I tried rendering those mbtiles myself, and I failed. You can do as I as I did, import data from exports available on geofabrik into spatialite. And then progressively render data from spatialite (I did not try that step). ogr2ogr allows you to do this: ogr2ogr -f "SQLite" db.sqlite roads.shp -dsco SPATIALITE=YES You can find those .shp here http://download.geofabrik.de/ http://download.geofabrik.de/ Then the query in spatialite, here with python: where2 = lambda lng, lat, dist: " where PtDistWithin(geom, GeomFromText('POINT(%f %f)', 4326), %f, 0)"%(lng, lat, dist) select2 = lambda lng, lat, dist: "select id, AsText(geom) from points "+where2(lng, lat, dist)
• pedalpete 7y ago
  "Do your maps look like everyone else’s?" This is the theme of an advertisement I'm putting together for next week. We've built a 3D API which is used by RedBull, Microsoft, ViewRanger, Polaris, and more to better engage their users than 2D Maps. All the sports tracking apps look the same, so if you want to differentiate your product, 3D maps can help tell the story. People use 3D maps for transportation, wildlife research, commercial drone operations and more. Check it out at https://ayvri.com https://ayvri.com API at https://ayvri.com/pages/api https://ayvri.com/pages/api
• _bxg1 7y ago
  I love the idea of OpenStreetMap, and I tried really hard to use it on Android when I purged Google from my life, but the client itself was just atrociously awful (OsmAnd). The data wasn't the main problem; most of the time it couldn't figure out my location at all. It constantly made my device hot. It was nearly useless as a mapping daily-driver. Now that I've switched to iOS, Apple Maps is leaps and bounds better, which should tell you something. It seems like a great dataset, and maybe the editing tools are better than the consumer clients, but if they really want it to gain traction they desperately need to put some effort into the end-user experience.
• lazyjones 7y ago
  Is Apache really an integral part of the recommended toolchain because of the custom module or are there decent alternatives based on modern stacks?