Finding a BifL smartphone

activistPnk@slrpnk.net · edit-2 1 month ago

Finding a BifL smartphone

Chewie@slrpnk.net · 2 months ago

What are peoples’ issue with Organic Maps? (seriously - it would be interesting to know) I use it all the time, and it’s great. Some of the routes are sub-optimal, but not often. Finally you can search with postcodes (that has been a problem in the past).

Maybe it’s not perfect, but I only ever have to default to google maps when someone sends me a crappy shortened link to something. Once I get the actual address, i can swap back to Organic Maps. It used to eat battery on my Fairphone 2, but I had other problems with that phone too!. I love it, and the offline maps are perfect for when I am travelling.

solrize@lemmy.world · edit-2 2 months ago

I get terrible (not “suboptimal” but genuinely ridiculous) routes enough of the time to call the program not fully working. There is also a thing where if there are two routes of roughly equal quality, instead of choosing one and sticking to it, OM will keep trying to switch between them, asking for a lot of crazy U-turns. The POI search is also lame: if you enter “McDonalds” and there are 10 of them in the area, it shows them in some weird random order instead of nearest first.

I do use OM in preference to Google Maps because privacy and offline etc., but it is only usable maybe 75% of the time. If I’m in a hurry or otherwise unwilling to make some wrong turns, or if OM messes up, I end up using Google. Google simply works a lot better. Ugh.

It would also be nice if OM’s voice directions included street names, and that map updates didn’t download entire new maps, but those are features to be engineered. Still, the California map data is over 1GB all by itself, that has to be re-downloaded once a month or so. De Lorme Street Map in the Windows 95 era fit all the US streets on a CD-ROM (700MB) so while OSM data might be richer, there’s still a bunch of bloat going on. And streets don’t change that often, so the monthly update should be tiny compared to the initial download.

Chewie@slrpnk.net · 2 months ago

I get terrible (not “suboptimal” but genuinely ridiculous) routes enough of the time to call the program not fully working. There is also a thing where if there are two routes of roughly equal quality, instead of choosing one and sticking to it, OM will keep trying to switch between them, asking for a lot of crazy U-turns. The POI search is also lame: if you

That’s weird, I only see 1 route choice when I use it.

enter “McDonalds” and there are 10 of them in the area, it shows them in some weird random order instead of nearest first.

True, that is a bit annoying, although it’s getting better, if you move the viewport over the area you want to search on (if you’re not there already), it seems to try and show local stuff first.

I do use OM in preference to Google Maps because privacy and offline etc., but it is only usable maybe 75% of the time. If I’m in a hurry or otherwise unwilling to make some wrong turns, or if OM messes up, I end up using Google. Google simply works a lot better. Ugh.

That’s a shame. It’s pretty good where I live, and I can find most things I need to travel to, although yes, the index could be better.

It would also be nice if OM’s voice directions included street names, and that map updates didn’t download entire new maps, but those are features to be engineered. Still, the California map data is over 1GB all by itself, that has to be re-downloaded once a month or so. De Lorme Street Map in the Windows 95 era fit all the US streets on a CD-ROM (700MB) so while OSM data might be richer, there’s still a bunch of bloat going on. And streets don’t change that often, so the monthly update should be tiny compared to the initial download.

Fair enough. I’m in the UK, and both here and in Europe, sub-country areas are available for download, which helps. Maybe the streets don’t change often, but load of POIs change from one month to the next. This is just 1 day of changes from https://osmstats.neis-one.org/?item=countries:

A lot of it will be “trivial” metadata i’m sure, but still, there’s quite a lot of change going on!

solrize@lemmy.world · 2 months ago

I don’t mean OM gives me a choice of routes. Rather, say there are two reasonable ways to reach the destination. OM chooses route A, says turn right, ok fine, I turn right. Then after a few seconds, OM changes its mind and wants route B instead. So it says take a U turn and go this other way, oops! But if you do that, it changes its mind AGAIN, and you end up going in circles.

Re downloading a subset of the maps: yes I can do that, but then I have to predict which ones I’ll need, just another thing to remember. I have all the California maps installed so that if I suddenly decide to drive to Barstow or something, I don’t have to figure out which counties I’ll traverse, since they are all already downloaded. What I really want is to download ALL the maps, the whole world, might be 50GB or whatever, but that’s ok, we can buy 2TB microSD cards now. If that download was a one-time event with occasional small updates I could deal with it, but I don’t want to do the whole thing every cycle.

Anyway, as a development snapshot I guess OM is pretty nice, but I can’t call it a finished product,

Chewie@slrpnk.net · 1 month ago

I don’t mean OM gives me a choice of routes. Rather, say there are two reasonable ways to reach the destination. OM chooses route A, says turn right, ok fine, I turn right. Then after a few seconds, OM changes its mind and wants route B instead. So it says take a U turn and go this other way, oops! But if you do that, it changes its mind AGAIN, and you end up going in circles.

Weird, i’ve never had that happen to me!

Re downloading a subset of the maps: yes I can do that, but then I have to predict which ones I’ll need, just another thing to remember. I have all the California maps installed so that if I suddenly decide to drive to Barstow or something, I don’t have to

Ok, but what’ the alternative process?

figure out which counties I’ll traverse, since they are all already downloaded. What I really want is to download ALL the maps, the whole world, might be 50GB or whatever, but that’s ok, we can buy 2TB microSD cards now. If that download was a one-time event with occasional small updates I could deal with it, but I don’t want to do the whole thing every cycle.

Sure, it’s not as efficient as it could be, but maybe that will change with time. They are pretty good at adding features to it fairly regularly.

solrize@lemmy.world · edit-2 1 month ago

I’m not sure what you mean about “alternative process” for updates. In the chart you posted, the US got 466227 updates in 1 day which is about 14 million per month if that happens every day. If they are 100 bytes each (no idea if that is realistic), that’s 1.4GB a month for the whole US. Right now a new map download is something like 1.1GB for California alone. California is the biggest US state (not in terms of land area but certainly in terms of roads) but the whole US might be 10x or 20x bigger.

I’d say OM is less in need of new features than of getting its existing features working solidly, warts ironed out, etc. The one major feature improvement i could see is getting the voice directions to include street names, but in practice it’s not that important, at least in my usage.

Google Maps has a sometimes useful feature that an offline app like OM can’t possibly get, which is routing and ETA calculations based on realtime road and traffic conditions. I don’t rely on that very often, but on occasion, it really helps. Unfortunately I suspect that much of the traffic data comes from the devices themselves phoning home with their locations, and only Google and Apple have enough devices out there to usefully do that.

Chewie@slrpnk.net · 1 month ago

I’m not sure what you mean about “alternative process” for updates. In the chart you posted, the US got 466227 updates in 1 day which is about 14 million per month if that happens every day. If they are 100 bytes each (no idea if that is realistic), that’s 1.4GB a month for the whole US. Right now a new map download is something like 1.1GB for California alone. California is the biggest US state (not in terms of land area but certainly in terms of roads) but the whole US might be 10x or 20x bigger.

Sorry, I’m not sure what you mean by that.

I’d say OM is less in need of new features than of getting its existing features working solidly, warts ironed out, etc. The one major feature improvement i could see is getting the voice directions to include street names, but in practice it’s not that important, at least in my usage.

Fair enough

Google Maps has a sometimes useful feature that an offline app like OM can’t possibly get, which is routing and ETA calculations based on realtime road and traffic conditions. I don’t rely on that very often, but on occasion, it really helps. Unfortunately I suspect that much of the traffic data comes from the devices themselves phoning home with their locations, and only Google and Apple have enough devices out there to usefully do that.

Yes, that’s exactly how it works. I get tracked enough without adding my location data, so however useful it is, I can live without it.

solrize@lemmy.world · 1 month ago

About the update stuff, I just meant I calculated a possible size of differential updates. I think it would be enough to just have a setting saying which map segments I want to bother updating at all, or anyway to keep the POI’s updated. POI’s in my local area, sure, I’d keep those updated. But I’d like to have large scale maps (all of California, or the whole US) for the purpose of routing long trips, and don’t care much about the POI’s.

I figure my phone is being tracked merely by being on the carrier network. In principle I could leave it in airplane mode but that stops incoming messages and stuff. So I try to use Google Maps sparingly but I so far don’t claim to 100% avoid it.