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] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

TIL the nickname 'maccas' https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_for_McDonald%27s

Yeah I find that a lot of FOS software is missing some features compared to commercial software. But many times after the initial learning curve it's really not missing as many features as I thought. For example OM has a super easy way to record a track, which GM doesn't have, and I now use it often for new hikes so I can find them again.

FOSS represents a world I would much rather live in, I think it's a more equal world, so some minor inconveniences and even donating small bits of time and money to help the project succeed is a feature that is important to me.

[–] [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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Doesn't seem very deep

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

What do you mean by this?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

You say it seems deeply flawed, but these are not very deep issues to fix?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

You know what, you're right. They're extremely big issues in terms of how big their impact on it experience is, which is what I intended to convey, but at a technical level they're likely very surface issues that could be fixed quite easily. Especially the second one, which also happens to be the bigger issue for UX. I could have phrased myself better.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Your number one concern is that if you search for a word it doesn't give you results for another word? Should they be training the search index with urban dictionary just to be sure?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

My number one concern is that two out of the very first two things I tried doing worked spectacularly badly. It failed to turn up the expected results. If you read the post you'd know that of the two issues, the other one was the one I considered the worse of the two though.

Should they be training the search index with urban dictionary just to be sure?

If that's what it takes? It's not really my concern how it works, only that searching for X should turn up X, even if the way X was searched for doesn't work with the sort of naive text match search that might work with a simple regex. Whether that's typo detection or recognising ubiquitous alternative names.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 weeks ago

At least 50% of your issues is that OM didn't know slang.

Gtfo

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago

I don't think developers read this. Head over to https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues