

Show HN: My nights and weekends project based on openstreetmaps - rithal
http://besttravelapp.org/

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grecy
Looks great. A couple of questions:

1) Are the maps route-able? Can I use this for turn-by-turn?

2) Can I download the entire world OpenStreetMap and use it with this app? For
a round-the-world I'm planning, I'd like to get maps of everywhere. (For
example, last time I drove from Alaska to Argentina, and I'd like to be able
to use the OpenStreetMaps of everywhere in between)

Thanks!

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rithal
No routing as of now. My main target segment is tourists on foot in popular
travel destinations outside of their country. I think a map of the entire
world is too big to fit on an iPhone (at least in pre-rendered map tiles - not
sure if 64G can hold vector data either). An option for you could be to
download the maps of all towns in your path and rely on paper maps for
highways connecting the cities. If you do end up using my app and don't find a
map you need, just let me know :)

~~~
grecy
Thanks

> No routing as of now.

Are you planning to add it?

> I think a map of the entire world is too big to fit on an iPhone

Fair enough, but I'm still wondering if I can just use "raw" OpenStreetMap
data and load it into your app? Do you have some kind of internal "conversion"
process to make the map usable with your app? maybe you could release that
tool so we can do it for ourselves? (Again, I'm sure you don't want to
manually convert maps of every town on the Pan American highway from Alaska to
Argentina for me (that's 16 countries worth))

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rithal
I might release it some day. Right now, the code is not release-worthy. I do
know my way around it since I wrote it and so, it's really pretty easy for me
to add new maps if you send the names of the cities without much manual work.
Thanks for giving me the idea of automating this further though - may be users
can look up cities and the backend can generate a map for them, publish it and
notify them when it is available. However, since I get requests for new maps
very infrequently, I am too lazy to do it right away.

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thechut
Hey, great work! I'm currently working a mapping project, with smallish,
customized maps. I'm wondering about your strategy for map tiling? Did OSM do
it/provide an easy for you to tile the maps/download the tiles? Basically I'm
looking for some software that will help me turn my own images into map tiles.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

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rithal
I use mapnik to generate tiles from OSM data. Get in touch with me via email
ravi at light fighter labs dawt com (dawt should avoid harvesters :)) I'll be
glad if I can help.

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basseq
I just got back from Aruba, and would have loved to have a map (no
international data plan). Could definitely see the draw.

~~~
rithal
Buy it now so you don't have to remember to buy it before your next trip :)

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wingerlang
Whats your thoughts on the app MapsWithMe? I use it and it lets me download
whole countries with surprisingly good detail.

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rithal
That's an awesome app. I would like to have their rendering detail and
compression but settled for what I did to make sure I have an MVP. They
focussed on map rendering quality and I focussed on travelers' needs. They
were 4 guys working for a year and I was one guy with nights and weekends
working for 2 months before launch. On another note, I made my app free for a
couple of days a few weeks ago and it became the #1 travel app in 18 countries
and it overtook Google Earth on the US AppStore for a day or so. See my
account on that here: [http://blog.lightfighterlabs.com/how-i-
got-45000-downloads-i...](http://blog.lightfighterlabs.com/how-i-
got-45000-downloads-in-3-days/)

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molmalo
Nice! Are you planning to make an Android app?

~~~
rithal
Android has built in offline maps. Not sure about POIs not sure if the quality
is as good as openstreetmaps for offline version. Given the app sales
monetization for iOS vs Android is ~ 9:1, I need to come up with other
monetization methods before working on an Android version.

~~~
molmalo
Yes, Android has offline maps, but based on google maps. It would be nice to
have an OSM-based app. There are lots of places globally where OSM is more
detailed than google's.

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piechlediech
I highly recommend oruxmaps. it is free and you can use both tiles and vector
data as offline sources.

~~~
molmalo
I didn't know it, thanks!

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danso
Reading through the reviews on iTunes (which are generally positive), I
noticed that there were a number of mentions of how their city/region was not
on the map, and after they contacted the developer, that area was
downloadable.

Theoretically, why isn't _all_ of the geography downloadable when given
certain parameters? I'm unfamiliar with how OpenStreetMaps works, so was just
curious what kind of manual tweaking/map-downloading that you, the developer,
have to do.

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rithal
Why the entire planet is not available: I wanted to host it on an inexpensive
server (only what's needed), generate maps only for regions that are popular
among my target segment (popular tourist destinations mostly) since compute
was also an issue - I generated all the maps on a VM on my desktop. I download
the openstreetmap data to my local hard disk for the regions I need, generate
the maps using mapnik and extract poi data using python utilities that I
wrote. Not a whole lot of tweaking but I did have to write my own tools.

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gcb
Lame for not mentioning map source prominently.

Will probably checkout when i have an ios device...

~~~
rithal
Added the credit as a main feature. Now that I think of it, it is a feature
rather than just a credit. OpenStreetMap is indeed better than many commercial
mapping data sources for some of the cities.

The app has the credit as an overlay in the map screen so it's very hard to
miss. I'd missed it on the website. Thanks for pointing out.

