Re: [Announce] Native offline maps: OSM Scout Server
 

Hi rinigus, two questions, also related to search function:

• How do I have to enter a search string for OSM Scout Server?
  If I use WhoGo Maps (or soon Pure Maps) I normally use OpenCage or Photon. Both work quite OK. But the search with OSM Scout doesn't really work for me. For example if I want to search for "München" (Munic) I get a lot of results, but non of it is München itself but Münchner Straße, Münchenroth, Münchenroda...
  
• I was 3 weeks ago in England, visiting friends. They live quite rural, out of town. So they don't have a house number nor a street name. The only possibility to navigate to them, was using HERE WeGo (Android), because there you can enter the postcode. Is postcode search planned in future releases?

Re: [Announce] Native offline maps: OSM Scout Server
 

I second the postcode search requirement.

Regarding München, check out here :D
In short, form the search query as "<house number>,<street name>,<town>,<country", with fields omitted as necessary.
In your case, ",,München".

Re: [Announce] Native offline maps: OSM Scout Server
 

Re München: This has been an issue that was resolved probably few releases ago. It was resolved by sorting the results differently by geocoder-nlp and was raised earlier in this thread due to the similar issue in UK (see linked post by pichlo). When just tested, "München" gave a city as a first result. So, please try with the current version.

Re search string: when all works as it should, libpostal processes the addresses in the natural (for selected languages in OSM Scout Server) order of addresses. In Estonian, that would be street housenr, city, country (commas can be skipped). When it fails for one reason or another (shouldn't be frequent), you could set in OSM Scout Server settings for GeocoderNLP to use primitive parser which will use the same hierarchy sequence as suggested by
pichlo.

Re postcodes: sounds like its a popular request for UK. I have opened an issue regarding it, but haven't worked on it yet. In theory, its possible, since my import pipeline has that data available, at least in part. But I will have to think how to do that. Obviously, libpostal knows how to separate postal code from the address, but the search has to be done by my geocoder.

Re: [Announce] Native offline maps: OSM Scout Server
 

In the UK, postcodes are the way of giving directions. There is nearly a direct mapping between a postcode and geographic coordinates. There is a postcode for every street; long streets can have several postcodes. And of course important landmarks have their own postcodes too.

So I would not say they are "popular". More like "essential".

Re: [Announce] Native offline maps: OSM Scout Server
 

Can you specify how do you expect this to work. Do you just type in the postcode and get coordinates to drive to? Or do you specify post code and some additional information?

Having a mapping between postcodes -> coordinates is "simple". So, driving on the basis of postcodes only.

Having a mapping between postcodes and some extra data is harder. Not sure how to do that properly yet

Re: [Announce] Native offline maps: OSM Scout Server
 

Well in Here WeGo, I just put in the postcode. More wasn't necessary and as I told you my Frinds don't have a proper adress, no streetname, no house number, BUT a postcode.

Re: [Announce] Native offline maps: OSM Scout Server
 

@rinigus I have to excuse me. The problem with the search string was my mistake. On the last Map update, there must have gone some things wrong, therefore some parts were not downloded completely. After downloading them anew all works as expected.

Re: [Announce] Native offline maps: OSM Scout Server
 

GUI software programming can be FUN, especially if it has to account for quirks of both mobile and desktop platforms. :)

If you do decide to port Poor Maps to also run desktop Linux and other mobile platforms I have some experience with that from modRana development (8+ years :D). Also if you decide to use Universal Components for common multi-platform QML GUI codebase I'm standing by to answer any questions & fix/improve the API (time permitting). :)

That's definitely understandable - now after the "analysis" is done, it's not looking that complicated anymore. :) Still there is quite a bit to do in othter places in modRana as well (finally use proper TTS & improve navigation mode, use the new icon & branding recently contributed for modRana, add support for MApBox GL native widget, typed POI search, etc.).

Any other takes for a modRana coding adventure ? ;-)

Yep, that has been my idea as well.

I'm thinking about a map screen button that's shown when a road is being followed as the primary entry point for this feature. That should help with discoverability & make the feature available when most needed.

Yep, that could be the secondary access point after the on map button.

Yeah, I really need to handle that as well - sorry for not acting on your issue/PR for so long. :P

Yeah, that looks doable. I'm starting to think it might be good eventually rethink how some of these screens work but that can wait before the more pressing issues are implemented and fixed.

Re: [Announce] Native offline maps: OSM Scout Server
 

Postcode only! I don't know anyone in the UK who puts more than just the postcode into a satnav, like Pichlo said the mapping between postcode and coordinates is quite precise.

Let's say you are navigating to a house, 99% of the time the postcode would take you within 100m of the house and you'd just be looking at house numbers from that point. For something like a supermarket, the postcode would probably take you to the centre of the car park.

We don't tend to have long residential roads with 100s of houses either, typically the number of houses on a street would be less than 50.

Re: [Announce] Native offline maps: OSM Scout Server
 

Here is a link to UK postcodes: https://postcodeaddressfile.co.uk/