Organic Maps (Unofficial)

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Organic Maps is a free Android & iOS offline maps app for travelers, tourists, hikers, and cyclists based on top of crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap data and curated with love by MapsWithMe (Maps.Me) founders.

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Organic maps search seems deeply flawed (aussie.zone)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I tried two fairly basic searches and both had pretty fundamental flaws that make it very hard to consider using OM as a main navigation app.

First: it doesn't seem to be able to use common informal names for places. If I search "Maccas" on GM, it correctly shows a number of McDonald's restaurants, as well as Maccas competitors like Hungry Jacks. In OM I get a few places literally named "Macca's", followed by a bunch of much more tenuous results. No actual Maccas shows up.

Second, and probably more serious: it doesn't tell me where something is. I typed in my street name, and understandably a number of results with that name came up. It tells me the city and state they're in, but doesn't get more fine-grained than that. With multiple of the same street in a given LGA, it is basically impossible to search by street address if the search result doesn't narrow it down to suburb. This seems like an incredibly small fix to make, but also a mind boggling error to not already have.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah the term Maccas is pretty much ubiquitous in Aus. You'll hear it used way more often than the official name, and even the company itself embraces it with, for example, the official app being "MyMaccas".

Personally yeah, I believe in FOSS and want it to succeed, but there's only so much compromise on usability I can take. There's a reason I use Audacity, Libre Office, and MuseScore, but not Gimp, for a similar example.

I'm curious what you mean about the "record a track" thing. Something like uploading an activity from my Garmin? Or like preparing a route to follow with the RideWithGPS route planner? Loosely related, one of my absolute favourite GM features which is going to mean I'm not giving it up entirely even if I do switch my daily driver to OM, which is the location history.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

That's a good point. I don't know of a location history available in OM that tracks you all the time. Yeah I haven't totally moved away from GM myself.

If you want to track yourself you can open the hamburger menu and turn on "Record Track". This will keep sampling your gps in the background and showing breadcrumbs of where you have been. Then if you save it, the breadcrumbs will turn into a solid line that will remain on your map. Other than seeing where you were, you can't see what time you were at each place within OM. If I care to see time history I export the track as a .gpx file and read it with other software. For hiking I use camptocamp.org.

I assume OM's tracking will waste more battery than GM's location history which isn't as accurate but serves different purposes.