I'm currently trying to switch from Google Maps for my smartphone, not because maps are more detailed in geek-dense areas (although they are), but because Google seems to have hired a bunch of drunken lemurs as its usability team.
I mean, I value simplicity, especially on the go, and the OSM-based softwares I've tried are by no mean perfect. But with recent versions of Google Map, I have difficulties:
* bookmarking my current location, especially when offline
* getting a scale displayed on my map (a scaleless map was a mandatory Fail in geography classes)
* giving itinerary boundaries through clicks
* sharing a marker as a public URL
* getting rid of research results once I've seen them
And whenever I find a contrived way to do one of those things, more often than not, a couple of weeks later it's taken out by a new "simplification". I'll grant you that maps looks nicer and nicer, but it becomes less and less usable at an alarming speed.
I agree 100%. As Google Maps/Nav moved from 6.x to 7.x it got prettier but terrible to use. I'm still kind of shocked that they fucked up the usability of Nav so bad and still haven't fixed it a year later.
They used to have one (it was an optional add-on from Googke Labs). They got rid of it. It's not the bad UI thasr bothers me most about Google Maps, it's the fact that they are clearly trending toward WORSE UI not better.
Wow, I am shocked.
I just tried OsmAnd again when visiting FOSDEM and trying to save on my roaming plan, but Google Maps on Android was so much superior for me.
It's hard to search for a street.
It's harder to search for a Hotel
The overlays (maybe I could tweak them) showed me useless things and not even the central station.
I really tried to like it, but so far... not gonna happen.
There is a lot of OSM-based maps, free and paid. I'm developer of one of those apps: http://galileo-app.com It works offline. Sharing based on url-scheme and our service. Search result destroyed as soon as you clear search field. :) And many more features.
Check it and tell here or directly via email info@galileo-app.com your opinion or ideas about improvement. :)
May be later this year. Now we focused on best possible iOS app. Engine is written in C++, and relatively easy to port to Android, but app itself also requires lots of work.
Two suggestions: allow me to download a whole country at once, without per-land or per-state confirmations (maybe paid feature?), and change the "less points" label to read "fewer points" under settings/gps filtering/distance threshold.
I may have more after playing with it for a while.
But I disagree with whole country download. From one side it's good to have map of all country, but you'll have to download 2Gb, it will take 4Gb on your device, we'll pay much more for traffic, and finally you'll never visit all states in USA. :)
We use old icon for iOS6 devices. For those who don't like flat design we keep old good 3D icon.
And there is also a confusing bug in the App Store. It shows old icon for iOS7 devices, and new one for iOS6. But when app is installed it displays correct icon.
Looks good - will go for an in app GPS tracking to say thank you for writing it - and if the NSA and Apple know where I am at least I should keep a copy too
It's possible that the problem is that OSM lacks the data. For example, in Melbourne, Australia, only a handful of suburbs have any form of street number data, and the street/suburb mapping is overall moderately poor. (If you struggle hard enough you can probably get around it, e.g. in OSMAnd you can search for a street name and then "search in nearby towns/suburbs" and it'll tend to show the right one.)
> And whenever I find a contrived way to do one of those things, more often than not, a couple of weeks later it's taken out by a new "simplification".
This seems to be a running gag for all of Google's services, the past few years. Like moving around and changing the "log out" button (did I say button, it's a link now), then for a while inconveniencing people circumventing that via Private Tab. It's awful.
It's like they're trying to numb you into compliance to go with whatever flow the UI-of-the-week directs you into.
If I had to navigate Sochi, I would overwhelmingly prefer Google's version. It's cleaner, has better contrast and a number of subtle touches (english translations, one-way arrows, ...). When I travel, I always download offline OSM maps, in case, but eagerly get a SIM card with a data plan and switch to Google Maps (and I suddenly find myself better oriented).
The point of OpenStreetMap is that we provide the data and you provide (or you use services that provide) an interpretation of the data that's useful to you.
The rendering style you picked is certainly different than Google's. MapQuest Open's rendering style is pretty darn close to the Google Maps link you pointed at [0], and other map providers like MapBox let you build maps with styling how you like it in just a few clicks (including picking English labels when known). I made one just now [1].
We don't do a great job of making the point when you arrive at osm.org, but we aren't competing with Google Maps. We're competing with Navteq/Nokia and other map data providers.
While I get your point, I don't think it's very productive.
The majority of the people who interact with OSM will get a perception of it that's biased by the presentation. Even with the MapQuest Open style, Google Maps, to me, are far more pleasant to look at and easier to understand. The text seems to be rendered in a better, more readable way, and GMaps has a better handle on decreasing contrast for things that aren't that important, allowing more important features to stand out.
You can tell me that I shouldn't care, because you provide such awesome data, and I'm tempted to agree, but my reptilian brain will give me opposite feelings every time I try to look at your maps.
I'm not sure how you define 'productive' in this sense. OpenStreetMap provides data for people to make maps with. What you do with that data is (gloriously) up to you.
OSM doesn't have to "sell" their maps. It's the folks like Telenav that need to make their maps look better.
This is GNU/Linux/Ubuntu disambiguation and customer support problem.
There needs to be separate organizations to package and distribute this data and make apps for it. (A web map project will have different needs than an offline phone navigation app. OSM shouldn't try to gain/maintain domain expertise in everything.)
Let's try another example: do you use foursquare and if so how do you feel about its maps?
I think its a good example of data > render, with ux in the front of mind. Unfortunately we are good at the read case, not as good at the contribute case.
> We don't do a great job of making the point when you arrive at osm.org, but we aren't competing with Google Maps. We're competing with Navteq/Nokia and other map data providers.
If you want seven billion people using it, it's going to be quite necessary to create a consumer-facing canonical front-end.
I'm sure you can get lots of volunteer hackers to contribute if you throw up an MVP on github.
That's a bit like saying if you want Linux to be a success on servers, mobile phones, game consoles, routers etc. then you need to have a single distribution that they can all use.
Instead, there's room for Valve's SteamOS, Google's Android, Google's ChromeOS, Canonical's Ubuntu and many more, both commercial and community focused, competing in some ways, collaborating in others.
This announcement is one company that did exactly that, and provided a consumer-facing product built on OSM, who just got bought by a bigger producer of consumer-facing products who intend to do the same on an even bigger scale.
Not really. But Linux would not be what it is today if not for Red Hat historically and Ubuntu today. There needs to be a canonical (no pun intended) use case.
libpcap has tcpdump. linux has ubuntu. http has nginx (and previously, apache).
It would be great if there were a canonical frontend stack for OSM that we could all hack on to make as usable as Google Maps. It should be hosted somewhere central but also ship with easy chef or puppet configs to deploy a stack yourself easily.
I'd get tons of use out of something like that, and I'd contribute to the code, too.
Having used a few map services and utility libraries, I prefer that we aim towards more modular and distributed territory with geospatial technologies.
Monolithic engines are great for getting 80% of what your exact requirements are, then you're stuck with a bulky system that you're probably only using 10% of, and it doesn't do the other 10% of what you need.
Something like leaflet.js is nice because it gives you a simple way to present layers on a device, and it's modular meaning you can plug in extra behaviors or develop your own easily.
If a similar approach were taken for the other problem areas, like route finding, traffic monitoring, etc, I'd much prefer that over a bulky platform I'd never want to use the entirety of for any one project.
Of course once these modular components mature enough, no doubt soon, they will be packaged into some service that with a few simple clicks of a button generates the right combination to suit your requirement.
tl;dr OSM should do the data collation and serving and be good at that. Other services should spring up to do their magic with that data. And yet other services should provide easy ways to thread it altogether for a whole world of possible use-cases. (all IMHO of course...)
There are already several javascript libraries that use OSM tiles out there, most popular being OpenLayers[0] which offers an comprehensive API and Cloudmade's Leaflet[1]
I disagree. Wikipedia is a similar effort, and yet they have a highly polished look. I agree with the fact that OSM doesn't look as nice as GMaps, and I also agree that a better color/font scheme needs to be implemented if they want 7 billion users.
I don't know if I'd agree that Wikipedia has a highly polished look, but my point was more that you can have multiple polished looks, and it's actually easier to have a polished Linux for mobile phones and a seperate polished Linux for server usage (and so on), than to try to be all things to everyone. Wikipedia for example has multiple skins, multiple clients (including totally offline ones, similar to one of OSMs key differentiators).
And this article is the equivalent of say, Canonical taking Debian and saying they're going to make an easy to use desktop linux from it. It will almost certainly be more "polished" and end-user focused than openstreetmap.org, because they serve two different types of users.
Interestingly Wikipedia are actually a user facing front-end for OpenStreetmap data, in fact they have at least 4 projects using slightly different tech to put different front-ends on OSM as appropriate for their usage, e.g. the official Android app uses MapQuest OSM tiles to show articles that relate to your physical surroundings:
Again, not always what I'd call polished, but they're making creative use of map data, rather than putting some pins on Google Maps (or on an OSM based clone) and that's a good thing.
https://github.com/openstreetmap has existed for several years. And these projects are some of the most contributor-friendly projects ever. Really, just jump in and help with something.
I don't mean to belittle anyone, but I see no open source tools that consume the OSM data and output polished maps, or tools with which we can polish those maps ourselves easily.
Mapbox comes to mind, but it is a proprietary service, not open source.
I guess I'm wondering why enabling people to build an entirely free/oss mapbox isn't near the top of their priority list.
Mapbox's products are all made with open source. They're good OSS citizens in that they release all their tools under permissive licences, but perhaps more relevant is that they've hired several of the brightest coders in the OSM ecosystem.
If you want to render polished maps, you use Mapnik (developed outside, creators hired by Mapbox), probably creating your stylesheets in CartoCSS (developed by Mapbox) and using the friendly TileMill wrapper for prototyping (developed by Mapbox). If you want to do routing, you use OSRM (developed outside, creator hired by Mapbox). And so on.
So for your question, there absolutely is such an open source tool, and it's called Mapnik. Download it (maybe as part of TileMill) and have a play.
Of course you are. That's why there is a comparison of OSM and Google Maps smack in the middle of the blog post we're all talking about. User mindshare matters as much as developer mindshare.
I don't why Mapbox's tiles would be pixelated (except that they might have the preview page misconfigured), but I don't think Mapquest Open supports retina tiles yet.
A solution is to make the tiles half the size, but then all the labels are tiny. In addition to this, I dislike Mapquest Open's tiles because they're subject to jpeg compression. Unfortunately, it's the only free tile service out there without usage limits.
Yes, the OSM map is busier. Because it has the entire Olympic venue on it, wheras Google Maps shows it as empty space. Open, contribution-friendly data is a great thing.
Google Maps is less cluttered because it's displaying far less information.
In the Sochi example, take a look at the park to the left. OSM displays all the footpaths in the park, Google Maps display none. This is a running theme: all the red dashed lines are pedestrian rights of way that Google simply doesn't know about.
What if you wanted to cross the railway line on foot? You'd be out of luck with Google Maps...
And while we're looking at the railway, notice anything missing from Google Maps? Only the largest road (looks to be a highway) on the map! It seems like this is new and has yet to be added by the Google Maps team.
OSM has been shown to have more detailed data for many Asian and European countries (like Russia, in our example) than Google Maps, and this serves to make those maps "look more cluttered". But if I was visiting Sochi, I know which map I'd rather be using.
Using the transport layer is a bit of an odd choice for this comparison. The regular layer has the one-way arrows, as well as a wealth of other details: foot paths, parking areas, bus stops. I suppose that does makes it look a bit cluttered, but still to me in this instance OSM is clearly superior.
As you say, that extra detail makes it cluttered. I can only speak for myself, but having traveled to completely foreign locations, that extra clutter (that paradox of choice) just adds to the confusion and overwhelmingness of unknown territory.
When I look at OSM for a city that I know well, i'm not nearly as overwhelmed and I do find the information quite handy. Two different use cases, I guess.
I notice that they all (Google, OSM, Yandex) have comprehensive coverage of buildings and house numbers (though you might have to zoom to see them). I'm guessing this is open government data that's been imported, as I don't recall seeing them in the UK much.
Uk have a bit of a legacy mess of systems. they use ordinance survey for mapping which is quite detailed for physical features (roads, fences, woods, buildings) but often doesn't provide actual property boundaries. they charge quite a lot (for reasonable reasons in some industries) to access this. the post office hold a separate database (also costly) of real addresses
Sure, I didn't know about that until someone else pointed it out to me just now. I agree it's a beautiful rendering. It's paid though. That point aside, Sneak said what I meant to. If the goal is to have 7 billion people using OSM, this needs to be out of the box / default. Usability can't be an afterthought or something that's left up to the developer (if the goal is that sort of penetration)
Thanks for this piece of insight. Nobody in OSM's community of many thousands had ever brought it up before.
The reality is that if OSM is to scale to 7 billion users it itself can _not_ be the provider of all the tiles. The amount of infrastructure that this would require would be prohibitive for a nonprofit. Rendering & serving map tiles isn't like serving wikipedia pages.
You still don't seem to understand. There's nothing that comes "out of the box". The OSM project provides the data, that's it. Use the map provider that you like best to visualize that data.
Yes it's paid, because it's storing and rendering images that are updated by the minute in a very fast time. That sort of compution, and calculation isn't cheap. As you can see the compressed file format is about 25GB.
you can use TileMill to render the tiles and then host them yourself. its the hosting and the render farm that you can pay MapBox for, but there are ways around it if you are small and prepared to do work.
I agree the default OSM map is a bit ... pink. and yellow. and then blue. but at least it isn't Simpsons Yellow like default google. but see the link I posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7174856 for more free examples
> If I had to navigate Sochi, I would overwhelmingly prefer Google's version.
Do note that then you might miss a few details that Google doesn't yet include, like, say, the highway A-148 that now goes through the centre of town...
Criticizing OSM is at least as hazardous as criticizing Wikipedia, but...
Setting aside ideological purity, the actual rationality of switching solely to OSM depends on the actual quality and freshness of its data. And most of the world with money in play is more likely to follow rationality than ideological purity here.
But with regard to data quality, OSM is encumbered its own policy. OSM cannot (or refuses to) make use of high-quality bulk data from outside, regardless of how that data was licensed. Automation allows more frequent updates with a lot less manual labor as input - but OSM requires contributors to manually trace shapes in their weird browser app. Even where plenty of excellent liberally licensed data is available, OSM insists on making an army of unpaid monkeys re-make the SAME data in perpetuity.
That puts its pipeline at a permanent disadvantage to companies building proprietary datasets, which can take advantage of all kinds of automation. OSM simply isn't doing as much as it could to verify its data and stay fresh, and so it isn't doing as much as it could to end the status quo of proprietary data. Even if OSM reaches a usable state at a given moment, the world keeps changing to invalidate previously traced data, and OSM's policy ensures it will always be playing catch-up no matter who wants to donate data, because all the data has to come through this dopey manual process.
This viewpoint seems to be based on the assumption that proprietary datasets are going to be more up to date than a crowdsourced dataset. Having worked with proprietary datasets, often this assumption is wrong as these datasets (which could be eligible for importation) are often surprisingly poor quality and out of date. If a company can still make money selling their datasets to their same customers, there is no incentive for them to spend resources to keep it up to date.
What this viewpoint does hint at is it's comparison to Wikipedia, and the differences in geospatial data of a current map of the world. Pekk is correct, an area in OSM needs to be continually updated and refreshed, and this requires appropriate tools and a user base. Both of these exist or are being improved upon with OSM.
For example, work has happened re: Monitoring of changes, comparisons with imagery, map bug reports, automated feeds, academic and industry reports and evaluations of the quality with proprietary and national mapping agency datasets.
This is very true. My country's Government had an issue with a major internet project where they bought the best commercial address database available. Turns out that hundreds of thousands of addresses in there were incorrect, and tens of thousands just didn't exist. Caused huge problems.
Proprietary geospatial data can be very hit and miss. If you assume that the majority will be high quality, you're setting yourself up for disappointment...
> * OSM cannot (or refuses to) make use of high-quality bulk data from outside, regardless of how that data was licensed. *
There is actually not a lot of "high quality bulk data" out there. What datasets are you thinking of?
Remember OSM is "open data", so you can't import propriatary data. Some bulk datasets might not allow commerical reuse, or might forbid derivative works (i.e. no-one can change it).
> OSM requires contributors to manually trace shapes in their weird browser app
There are many editors. iD is the browser app. There's JOSM a desktop, advanced app. And you can always upload raw data via the API.
OSM is constantly importing bulk data sets, anyway. For instance, in the UK the NAPTAN database was imported, giving the location and reference codes for all public transport stops. Postcode (like ZIP code) data is imported from a monthly building sales data release. I noticed the other day that Northern France suddenly has all buildings marked, because of some government data import. There are bulk data imports happening every week somewhere in the world.
Just for the record - NAPTAN wasn't consistently imported in the UK; we tried for a few counties and found it wasn't that great. The UK is probably the most import-hostile national community in OSM (and also, after Germany, probably the most successful in building the map; up to you whether you see a coincidence there!).
Is the purpose to make good data, or to make a community of people manually tracing things that were already traced in liberally licensed data? And how exactly does this help with maintenance?
It has been found that encouraging a community around the data collection creates much better data in the long run. An involved community can go beyond what is provided by other datasets and do more than can be done with 'tracing'.
There's more to OSM that road centre-lines and building outlines.
Can you link to any examples of them tracing over bulk, good quality, correctly licensed data? For example wiki pages or mailing list discussions saying they require this?
I think the effort is to make a community. You can always make your own maps separately that mix in other data. Trying to make a single map that will be all things for all people is a waste of time. Streetmaps only every show a tiny amount of data that could be shown.
Why do you think OSM isn't capable of utilizing automated processes? If anything, the manual editing process allows OSM to catch the long-tail data touch-ups that automated processes will never be able to handle.
Nobody said there should never be manual touch-ups, but you can certainly do manual touch-ups on top of bulk imports. Everyone else does. A process which depends on a ton of unpaid manual labor to do what bulk imports should be doing is not very scalable... if you have that labor, why not ensure that it goes to the touchups rather than to duplicating things people have already done and want to contribute
>A process which depends on a ton of unpaid manual labor to do what bulk imports should be doing is not very scalable...
Oh. I think yes this is scalable. I'll give folks some examples of how crowd-sourcing works like this, and how it can be scalable.
1. A person knows where they live, they can add their own street. They may know their neighbourhood, they can map it from scratch, or more likely keep it up to date. The user may see that their family home or where they vacation needs a tweak here and there, and pops on and edits. It's very casual, very local based monitoring and editing. This is scalable in the sense that it's small tasks that take a small time.
2. Based on an academic evaluation of a countries government's base map and OSM, several places are shown to be less well covered in OSM. These are targets for more dedicated mappers to examine, on foot, or with aerial imagery to improve. Hardcore mappers mainly here, large tasks, large time.
3. Mapping workshops are held in a small town to blitz a new development, fill holes and cover an entire area all at once. Twenty participants can do a large area with transport and the right equipment.
4. web based task manager is set up to allocate squares of land for people to trace from, dozens of people can take a small square and trace over the top. Local knowledge can then quickly add in names and landmarks.
So you can see that there are a number of different crowd-sourced labour approaches which would replicate what an import would do, but that by crowdsourcing you actually increase the number of people in that labour pool. An import does not help increase the number of contributors.
Now, this is more scalable in developed countries where there are more people with time to donate (same applies to any unpaid crowdsourced project), and so that example no. 1 in developing countries of an organic community keeping things up to date wouldn't really happen. However it's quite widespread in the developing world that there are no proprietary datasets of any decent quality. Imports could not even be considered in these places.
The problem with manual touch-ups on imported data is that when a newer version of the bulk data is released there's a difficulty with how to merge the datasets. This is the problem the US mappers are finding with the newer versions of TIGER.
And there are in fact huge amounts of bulk-imported data despite the wariness. Much of the U.S. road network is based on TIGER imports (especially outside cities that have a lot of OSM editors). Some of the bulk imports are easy to see on a macro scale, because there will be a conspicuous change in data density at a political boundary: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/34.266/-84.468
I think it varies by language and country too. The UK had to start from zero (and this prompted the creation of OSM) but may have left a cultural impact on the kind of person who joined the project, whereas the US had freely licensed Tiger data that was really created for an entirely different purpose and created a lot of problems and stopped a community forming (or at least that's the common storyline, I think it's more complex than that).
Whereas some other countries seem to have had better sources of data available and got on with the job of figuring out the best ways to import them without making a mess.
Yeah, it's a tricky question, especially when it comes to updating (imo the initial import was fine, though some people disagree).
I like the current assisted approach of letting you turn on a TIGER 2012 overlay in the editor, and/or use tools like the "TIGER 2012 Battlegrid" (http://maproulette.org/battlegrid/) to find where OSM/TIGER differ.
So far based on some limited experience fixing OSM based on those tools, it's a good decision imo not to do it in an automated fashion, because when I've found OSM/TIGER differences, it was about 50/50 which of the two was right.
And again, OSM is not fighting for the biggest user-share, but for the freedom of its users - who are not supposed to just be users, but maintainers too. It is a project for freeing all the human people from any lock-in for all geographical data.
See also the recent buzz around gcc (TL;DR: gcc is about freeing users from proprietary implementations, not about having the best product ever), and Wikipedia (everybody knows something, Wikipedia is here to share this knowledge and make sure it can't be withheld)
You seem to have defined rationality to mean 'a person who cares solely about the present, with no value put on the future'.
Because a person who rationally cares about great map data for their whole lives, and also cares about other things (like liberty) might well prefer the growing pains of being an earlier adopter to the instant convenience of using Google Maps.
I understand that you, like many people, have decided that the attributes you care about are the only ones that are rational to care about. But that is a gross mistake, and that mistake undermines the entire premise of your rant.
This isn't about my preferences. The whole point is that only an arrogant asshole would claim their preferences are the only rational ones.
As another example within GPS, Waze used to give truly horrendous routes, as it would often fail to understand the difference between overpasses and intersections. A bunch of early adopters liked the promise of Waze and helped crowd-source the fixes, so that now Waze is a very good navigator.
By the OP's logic, the early adopters who helped make Waze great were irrational, because it truly was worse for quite a long time.
That said, I get it, you're just here to snark at strangers. After all, if you'd had even a hint of an interest in a real conversation you would've realized I never stated that any set of attributes was better than any other, nor that my interpretation of attribute definitions was the only valid one.
Anyway, thanks for the snarky bullshit and have a nice day.
Tangent for bored hackers: you can torrent the entire OpenStreetMap dataset right now. It's only 23 GiB, in a simple format stored as protocol buffers.
You would still have to roll your own offline geocoder.
From my experience with OSM and Oracle's Spatial Geocoder, getting accurate driving directions can be a very 'interesting' process.
To a first approximation, the geocode data is embedded in the planet file (as address tags associated with some object or another).
But most consumers aren't using the data as organized in the planet file, they are generating extracts based on extent or whatever criteria, and usually processing the data into some data model that is better for the work they are doing.
See also http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/, which has both a Google-style Geocoder and Street Address to Coordinates APIs. Uses OSM data, and ships as a downloadable VM with all data.
You can. For worldwide coverage you'd need at least 500GB disc space and 2-3 days of data crunching (assuming 32GB RAM, 8 cores, SSDs...) to build the Nominatim database. Photon is using Nominatim's database as input and will take another 2 days (if I remember correctly, met the author last year) to build.
(I work on OSM data professionally)
Does anyone use OpenStreetMap on Android with any success? I'd be grateful to hear of any maps/directions apps that I can use as a replacement in this category.
I work at BikeCityGuide, we make a Navigation System specialized for bikes.
We are based on OSM, and while not perfect, we are pretty satisfied with it. If you want to give it a try to see how it looks, you can see it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.bikecitygu... (you can test it for free and if anyone is interested in coupons let me know)
One of the main advantages for us is that we made an in-house routing algorithm so routing is done on your phone, that means that you don't need an internet connection while routing, but for that we need to download the maps, of course this is not possible with proprietary maps like Google Maps.
At the moment we're only in Europe and the map quality has been pretty good. We're are having some problems with some cities, like Madrid with the direction of the streets, but you know what's awesome, that when we get a mail from a customer telling us that this and that is wrong, we can reply them in a couple of hours telling them that the issue was fixed and it will be deployed in update.
I do use Navit [1] offline navigation which I belive uses offline maps based on OpenStreetMap. GUI is a bit quirky, but it works. Offline maps are downloaded from the application. I use simply snapshots apks from Navit's download page [2].
I've encoutered some bugs in the maps for new build roads. New means few weeks, but it otherwise works very good. It can be used as car navigation because energy consumption is rather fast so connecting to a car charger is a must.
I personnaly use OSMAnd, but the UI can be... demanding.
Another app that has been praised by a lot of people is CityMaps2go [0], both on Android and iOs. While the application is not open-source (which is why I don't use it), the underlying data comes from OSM, so by using this application you're fighting for OSM.
Indeed, the navigation works great IF you can remember how to work the UI. Never the less, I'm still in awe as how well accurate OSM is (in the Netherlands + Belgium).
"Horrendous!" "truly awful"? Can you elaborate on what exactly is wrong with OsmAnd's UI to elicit such a strong reaction? I use it myself and don't have any problems with it. It seems about the same as any mobile app with comparable complexity.
To search you press the menu, select search, select search by name (not the top item), get a box called "filter" with an almost invisible search button and where enter does not do a search. If it doesn't find any matches it just leaves a blank screen as if nothing has happened. Oh and if you pressed return first it wont find anything as the carriage return is part of the query so it doesn't match.
When I finally get the results of my query for "Hammersmith" it tells me that 309km away (some mistake, more like 3.9km) there is "Subway Station District Line;Hammersmith & City Line", and then the same result repeated around 150 times some with slightly different naming, and at varying distances from 309-328km away before it gets to other results in Hammersmith.
And you are trying to use this on a phone in the rain, you just give up and go back to google maps even though the data is worse.
EDIT: And if you select one of these it appears to be in Barking, as it found every station on the Hammersmith and City Line, although that is not 300km long.
Granted, I've never used it in a hurry. Also, my previous experience with maps was Garmin's City Navigator, which I thought was okay, but it was much worse than OsmAnd. I actually still use have it as a backup because it can run continuously for two days on two AA batteries.
The problem is expectations. When I pull up my map application, I want to find a position on it, usually navigate to it, and do so quickly. Having to navigate menus containing way too many unnecessary options slows me down and discourages most people from using it when gMaps has a simpler interface. Additionally, the maps seem very cluttered with useless information (for immediate navigation). Perhaps the best option would be to get rid of some of the features, since more features != better application. In the end though complexity isn't an excuse for a difficult interface.
http://mapswith.me has become very popular recently. I haven't used it much myself so I can give you a proper comparison. Otherwise, OsmAnd is open source and can be found in the F-Droid repository.
I'm giving mapswithme a try right now. I love that I can download all of the maps that are relevant to me, and then use it without an internet connection.
I use osmand and it works, but the UI is far behind Google maps. Truth be told Osmand is a fall back for when gmap fails rather than a first stop.
The number one huge win for Osmand is offline searching for points of interest. Being able to to pull up a list of all playgrounds close to where I am right now is invaluable when traveling with a hyperactive 3 year old.
No, though I would very much like to. Fairly often I drive in areas where good cellular coverage and good map coverage are spotty or even completely absent. I would love an easy to use app that I could run that would allow me to upload data. I also like OSM for the freely-downloadable-ness. Driving in dark (no data) areas I want to download in advance whatever map data is available; and Google makes that much more painful than it need be.
Yes, I use OSMAnd+ (the paid for version of the free OSMAnd app). Search sucks, but I routinely use it as a replacement for Google Maps and the quality of OpenStreetMap itself is just brilliant. Also being able to download whole countries and use it completely offline.
Edits are stored localy on your phone/tablet, and sent to osm (along with GPS traces you could have recorded) when you manually hit "send data" while a connection is available
One thing I really like about OSM is the fact that it accepts pull requests from anybody. For example, I live on a road that ends in "Street", but for whatever reason, Google's online maps have it marked as "Lane". This results in delivery drivers and service people often going to the wrong address. The street name was wrong on OSM, but I submitted a pull request and saw the fix implemented immediately.
Interestingly, Apple Maps, Mapquest, and Bing maps all have the right street name. After I submitted the PR to OSM, it's correct now, too. Only Google Maps is still wrong, which is unfortunate, since that seems to be the one most people rely on (especially w.r.t phone GPS's). I've had several instances of friends calling, confused on how to reach my house, after their Google Maps App took them to a house a few blocks away.
I tried making 2 contributions to Google Maps and both were rejected by overzealous moderators. So I gave up on trying to submit changes to Google Maps, plus, as the article correctly states - GMaps data does not belong to us, so why contribute?
I have been using OSM for 7 years and I really love the project. Nevertheless, the biggest issue I have when it is compared to GMaps is not the content nor rendering (those are relatively straightforward to change)... it is the geocoder + routing. There is not a good geocoder for OSM, period. Until we can put an address, like we can in GMaps, and get a pin in the right location, it will always be an option that is not a 100% replacement. Same with routing.
Don't get me wrong, it has its uses, but those two components are too critical to ignore or even advocate for full replacement.
It is usually also much more finicky with regard to address syntax. Google Maps does a good job handling spelling mistakes or ambiguous addresses. OSM is not on par with GM, yet.
Actually, "has all of the addresses" doesn't make much sense.
The way most geocoders work is by having street segments that are split at certain points and have from/to ranges of addresses. Here is a SO questions I asked many years ago that explains the logic:
In the US, a big chunk of OSM is based on a Tiger ingest. Tiger already had the segments split with the ranges (albeit some areas are not that accurate). In theory, you could still have a nice geocoder for US (the same is true for other countries like Germany).
The current crowdsourcing workflow of how people edit data in OSM makes it attractive for display (i.e. there is no need to split the street segments and add the address ranges for "pretty display"). But it also causes people to not edit the address ranges, snap the edges, etc, which just means that as a routing or geocoding dataset it is arguably actually worse.
You don't need _all_ the addresses to geocode. In theory, you could start with a particular country, clean it up for that problem. But right now, that is not the emphasis of OSM. The emphasis is a pretty base layer. For that OSM is awesome. For routing and geocoding, not so much.
OSM can be really good at routing. OSM cycle routing knocks the socks off Google, for example. But I'm with you on geocoding. (Personally I'm not entirely convinced that geocoding data wouldn't be better handled by a separate database.)
Routing is only as good as the data it is run off from. To do routing correctly for cars, you need direction of segments (one way, two way, only certain kinds of traffic like cars vs trucks, etc), some way to measure the cost it takes to transition the segment (like speed), in some cases number of lanes for "bear right or stay left type of directions" and even more difficult, z level connectivity (for example the Bay Bridge in SF has a set of segments that go above in one direction and another set of segments that go below - exactly in the same direction - right on top of each other).
Sure, yes. OSM has more of that data for cycling than anyone else; that's why I said OSM cycle routing is better than Google's. It's not there for cars yet (more OSMers survey by bike than by car), but all the things you mention are in the OSM data model, and all but number of lanes are commonly tagged in the best-mapped countries. It'll come in time.
Typical use case for me: hitting on Google Maps to find addresses via venue names; 99% of the time.
I.e. I enter the name of the restaurant etc + some fuzzy data, like part of town or name of the city. This just works.
Last time I checked (just now), this still didn't get me any useful results from OSM for the European capitals I frequent (Rome, Paris, Berlin).
I guess it is even worse for smaller cities.
Yes, there is some venue/business data. But it is too sparse, at least for most of Europe, for OSM to be a useful replacement for Google Maps -- even in the medium term.
The question would be: how could this be rapidly improved?
For example, I entered probably two dozen places that were missing on Google Maps, in the past. While this data is now Google's, I entered it, originally. What's more, if I would be adding it again, to OSM, I'd certainly enter the same data.
I wonder what the legal perspective would be if everyone crawled "their" data (i.e. the data they personally entered) from Google maps and forwarded it to OSM.
What you're talking about is geocoding, not mapping. OSM doesn't even have its own geocoder, and I'm yet to find one that gets anywhere near to Google's results. Sadly.
Sort of. The search box on the OSM.org site is more a data inspector than it is a search nearby box.
So going to a place and searching for 'fastfood' returns objects from around the world based on the name matching 'fastfood'. A more structured input, like 'fast food, detroit, mi' returns something more sensible (but it is still searching the city limits of Detroit, not the metro area).
So the machinery there provides information, but it is not set up for end user situations.
(but it is still searching the city limits of Detroit, not the metro area).
Not necessarily. It depends on what the geocoding software does. It might use rigid "city" borders, or might not. In Europe, we don't have these rigid "city borders", so lots of software has to cope with that.
Add more data to OSM! Placenames, neighboud names, road names, add pubs, restaurants, venues, with their names and addresses!
I wonder what the legal perspective would be if everyone crawled "their" data (i.e. the data they personally entered) from Google maps and forwarded it to OSM.
That would probably be against Google's ToS. However if the knowledge is still in your head, then you can just manually enter it into OSM.
The 'search' box on the front page uses Nominatim[1], a programme for turning lat/longs into addresses (and vice versa). If there's a bug or the output doesn't look right, feel free to submit an issue.
I use a GPS app on my iPhone called NavFree - it actually lets you use Google search for geocoding, and then OpenStreetMap data (stored offline, which is awesome) for the navigation.
It works really well. Sadly they haven't updated the data on the Australian version in six months though.
Kind of. It seems to have more data, but not nearly as much as Google. Of ten places I searched for, it knew two.
Also the search function is stupid. Say, I am zoomed into a city and enter a term. Instead of searching the city I am looking at, it searches the whole world.
Or lets say I searched for a restaurant. When I am zoomed into the max, Google Maps will show me all restaurants around the area (that makes sense, doesn't it)?
That's just basic UX stuff which, until fixed, will prevent people from using this over Google maps. Or rather: if will prevent people like me, to advertise it to their non-hacker friends, as I know, stuff like this will make them have a hard time and later tell me "it didn't work for me"
I guess what I'm trying to say is: OSM needs to be as useable as GM, before people will switch in masses.
I first encountered OpenStreetMap 2 years ago and was amazed at how precise it was. Moreover, the editor is simply awesome. I had a road opened last year next to where I live and it took me about 2 minutes to register, load the editor, make the change and save it.
If I could find a replacement for Google Maps that hooked into Google StreetView, I'd be a happy chappie. I find Google Street View and amazing tool, but want to move away from the maps part.
I refuse to install Google Maps on iOS, because every time I've installed it on our FAMILY iPad, it keeps driving the user to sign in with MY account, which it appears to have weaseled out of the sandboxed Google+ for iOS. Sorry, but firstly I don't want to have a search history. Secondly I don't want the search history of the rest of family to be linked to my Google account.
I understand that some people might want to switch this on as a feature, byt I don't, and Google have designed the app, so that it seems like it won't work without signing in. A very dark UI pattern if you ask me. This whole assumption of one-device-one-person is naive.
On a recent project, I looked into using OSM alongside streetview but after digging through Google's license it appears google's own maps are the only ones you can use if you're also using streetview.
Which makes sense, but I checked anyway as I had seen websites using other map services coupled with streeview.
The data isn't the problem of Openstreetmap. What's missing is one go-to site with a nice rendering that doesn't try to show off all features and offers a similar feature set as google maps (searching for locations, shops, navigation).
You forget the essential feature of Google Maps: advertising - the reason for giving you the other features.
Map data is free but serving maps is a service... Either you pay for it, suffer advertising or do it yourself - the first and last options are available from Openstreetmap.
I would use Open Street Map, except that I find aerial photographs are often an invaluable aid to navigation because they provide a more complete model of facts on the ground. Aerial photographs allow better recognition of landmarks - how wide is the road, how big is a building's parking area, does the address resolve to a football pitch?
The level of geographic information just isn't there to make it a viable first choice for me because orientation is more difficult.
My home address doesn't exist in OSM. Actually it does exist, but in the wrong city. This is due to the use of TIGER data, which doesn't align with Post Office addresses. So using my address, no one can find my house. And while I can edit the map to move the road where needed, I cannot change the city.
Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc, all have no problem finding my house.
Our existing geocoders don't do a great job (geocoding is a hard problem), and have an especially hard time at guessing containment in situations like you describe.
One solution is to map your house using iD (the default editor when you click the "Edit" button on osm.org) and add the full address, including the city and postcode. With that extra information, the geocoder should be able to find your address. Feel free to e-mail me if you've got more questions.
Curious to understand just how Telenav will try to make money off of OSM: Will they be the "Red Hat" of OSM? Will they sell "custom add-ons"? What might they do to both benefit the community and make money from usage? Could be great improvements, or could become known as "that day that OSM started to die"...
TeleNav sells navigations apps to smartphone users. They use OpenStreetMap data for some of those apps (and presumably want to use it in all their apps), so they're interested in seeing OSM prosper.
No, they're adding their QC resources to OSM's existing 20k+ monthly active editors and not only improving the map for their own use, but for others as well.
I'm currently working on a project that uses google maps in a few places. The main reason I'm not using OSM is gmaps.js [0]. Ideally I will find / create my own simple wrapper like this on top of OSM in the near future
Just to clarify, OSM is a map tile data source, while they do have feature data like business locations these are usually added on top of the map, as an separate layer by other entities, not by OSM.
Maintaining all those locations would mean a lot of work ( Moneygram for example has around 300.000 locations [0]) that usually involves some sort of revenue, ie displaying ads like Google does.
OSM only gets better when people add their knowledge to it. Add your knowledge of hardware stores in your town and it will be less for the next person to complain about.
I've been wanting to become an OSM contributor for a long while now as I like the idea, and there's lots of low-hanging fruit as far as map coverage of my area goes (in osm, it's just plain bad). I also like geocaching, which seems like it would go hand-in-hand with mapping.
But I still haven't found an OSM editor that doesn't suck. And right now I don't have the time to write my own, even though I've considered it more than once...
Not to mention that searching for "Conroe, TX" and taking the first, correct-sounding result got me ~10 miles south of city limits.
Now, Google has a couple of oddities, here (those two businesses apparently on the median between the freeway and the access road!), but the road data is more accurate and detailed (including street names).
I've done some editing on wikis, but I'm not going to try to jump in and correct that gap.
I think Nominatim tries to rank things based on how long their Wikipedia article, the the item to the south (that was at the top), is the one that links to Wikipedia. TBH it looks like bad mapping whoever put that there
I posted nearly the same reply to the other "you gotta use OSM!" thread a few weeks ago.
Completely unusable as a replacement to apple or google maps, for me. Might be OK for looking for roads, like, uh, a street map - but to replace gmaps functionality with the simple feature of "click on an icon and show me the details" it is not.
Not intuitive, but zoom in and hit the edit button. You should now see all the data as vectors. Click on anything and you will see all of the metadata.
Google Maps's killer feature for me is public transit information. It would be nice if there were an open public transit schedule database that interfaced with OSM.
Google tries to do the right thing here and get the authorities to publish the info in an open format. As I understand it, the big holdup is the fact that a City can sell that data to a single supplier instead and get income (at the expense of citizen's getting fast, efficient and cheap transport info).
Which outside the US isn't that great. In Germany it only has the railway data, but no buses or trams, which makes up most of the public transport in smaller cities and even important connections in larger ones.
I can't speak for anywhere else, but Google's public transit information for Beijing is excellent. Even has correct and complete information for bus routes. (Use ditu.google.cn for best location results, may require an IP address inside the PRC)
I've completely migrated recently from using Google Search, and use DuckDuckGo exclusively, even if sometimes I get results of lower quality. I'm willing to compromise for better privacy.
I have a sneaking suspicion that once finally I replace Google Maps with OSM there won't be any compromises to be made.
Out our firm, we do a Navigation system specialized for bikes, and TBH, for little side-roads and everything that is not the main roads, OSM seems to win.
I would say that where some services are lacking in that regard is geocoding, the spelling correction at Google is pretty hard to beat, addresses are incredibly hard to parse and Google has definitely and edge in that sense.
Brew pubs and bike trials are mapped. I dunno about pet friendly, but that can vary by country. IM(limited)E Austria is quite pet friendly (pets in hotels and all that), so Austrians mightn't tag that.
I like OSM and have also contributed to it. However, I would be wary of using OSM for navigation. It's very easy for someone to mis-edit (accidentally or maliciously). Also, it is difficult to revert a mis-edit because, unlike Wikipedia, the data is not chunked into pages and there are no simple textual diffs which a non-geek can review.
When in Tokyo lately I've used OSM and found it suprisingly good. What I did miss compared to the Google Maps app is the direction the device is pointing towards.
Google search and maps are the only google products I still use (well, plus youtube, but no account, and blogger, but only reading), and I use duckduckgo intermittently instead of google search, but OpenStreetMap just isn't good enough yet, primarily by nit having yet found a halfway decent mobile app.
I did like Navfree. It wasn't perfect, but neither is Google maps. Usually if one was not finding things correctly, the other would.
Now the application has gone to the trouble of upgrading itself on my phone, without upgrading the actual maps, so it was completely useless last time I tried to use it.
As a small data point, I used Open Street Map [OSMAnd+] only when I was in Brussels at FOSDEM this weekend. I used it a lot and it was absolutely superb. Obviously this is a major city, but I've also used it in the wilds of the Japanese countryside and found it to be equally reliable.
Hmm. You've found one of OSM's many achille's heels. You're in a part of the world that doesn't have very good satellite imagery coverage, so the only way we can map is using recorded GPS data.
You can help by wandering around with your smartphone's GPS turned on and uploading the traces to OSM.org for others to map with.
Anything that works towards resetting the balance of power against Google is fine by me. Not to mention I've found that Google Maps has given me erroneous directions more frequently than a few years ago.
It would be nice to have an app that pulls data from Google Maps (or Apple Maps), and at the same time sends location trace to Open Street Maps. That way I could use high-quality maps and still support the OSM project with raw trace data.
Can you give the search string you typed? As I mentioned elsewhere, geocoding is a hard problem, and we've certainly not solved it. We can make it better by improving the data, though. I'd love to make your search better next time.
For a reason I can't edit my comment. I forgot to mention that the future google maps doesn't seem to show a distance reference, the UI follows the shift from digital map to mapped services.
ps: I wonder if there's an open, possibly smartphone/crowdsourced picture database to fill the lack of photographic/streetview data in OSM. Thinking about reconstructing algorithm as shown by Microsoft Research labs.
The problem with OSM (as compared to wikipedia) is that there is less awareness about the project and contributing to OSM has to be made a lot easier. Also it needs to have enough eyeballs per sq. mile to verify that the changes made are actually good. In some places like Melbourne (and someone mentioned this earlier) OSM is horrendous.
I wonder if there is a way to integrate in OSM automatically gathered data from users smartphones, like Waze does. There seem to be incentives to smartphone app makers to provide that.
Is there any nice description of the ecosystem around OSM data? How do all these companies providing routing or geocoding make money?
There are lots of street numbers around parts of Brisbane (probably some of the most comprehensive are around Fairfield to South Brisbane). It's pretty easy to add - I traced my neighborhood and added address data in a couple of hours.
If you want to make the world a better place, you could do some around your house as well!
I mean, I value simplicity, especially on the go, and the OSM-based softwares I've tried are by no mean perfect. But with recent versions of Google Map, I have difficulties:
* bookmarking my current location, especially when offline
* getting a scale displayed on my map (a scaleless map was a mandatory Fail in geography classes)
* giving itinerary boundaries through clicks
* sharing a marker as a public URL
* getting rid of research results once I've seen them
And whenever I find a contrived way to do one of those things, more often than not, a couple of weeks later it's taken out by a new "simplification". I'll grant you that maps looks nicer and nicer, but it becomes less and less usable at an alarming speed.