HERE Maps has been sold
 

http://company.nokia.com/en/news/pre...eur-28-billion
http://360.here.com/2015/08/03/the-future-is-here/

Any reason to be worried?

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

I see no reason to worry really.

If you are worried that support for mobile maps applications would decrease on the premise that automotive is going to be primary platform, that probably does not happen.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

I'm worried about paying per use.

Not really for me, but for Sailfish. If we got a bunch of cheap Android devices with "free" GPS based on Google Maps and €250 Sailfish phones have to pay €5 or €10 per month for the same service, the disadvantage will be even bigger.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

Good to here that HERE is staying in europe and it's nice to see that car manufacturers are finally getting some decent mapping software for their automobiles.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

The manufactures that bought HERE Maps, were already using HERE Maps...

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

Why not OpenStreetMap? I think it is one of the best solutions to gather community contributions for. It might not be the best and the most complete map, but it can be.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

That I did not know. Perhaps their UI designs will improve to reflect their purchase now? ;)

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

It has nothing to do with UI. They bought the MAPS, again, it has NOTHING to do with UI whatsoever. They just don't need to pay for the license anymore, and other companies has to pay THEM license money now :p

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

Do you have enough intelligence to determine the date of this video and relevancy with this the topic?

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

That is literally a rumour from a year ago.
the word "MAY" being used...
How about verification more recent... and a current ...concrete "IS" as in "It IS now in being set up, or available for use" rather than rehashing old rumoured "possible-it-may-come-someday-butit-ain't-here-yet" news.
otherwise we should all just start doing...

oh wait sec ..
Breaking News everybody!


Nokia releases new Maemo based device!

http://company.nokia.com/en/news/pre...tarts-shipping

[at least this ^ actually has happened]

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

There are alternative map apps and car map/turn-by-turn apps in Warehouse, you know...

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

You have to wonder about a car manufacturer's dedication in mapping train, bus, walking and cycling routes though. I hope HERE gets to do these without interference from their new owners.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

Thanks. No, I didn't know. And Average Joe doesn't. Average Joe wants to buy a phone, swipe down into that icon list and find a free GPS app. Not having to know that there are forums like TJC or TMO, ask there, install an app that installs unofficial (unsafe?) repositories and then choose one of that weird named apps.

"Hmmm... better I'm picking a Moto G"

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

I didn't say the Average Joe knows about those apps, I just presented an alternative for people reading this thread.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

Ah, sorry. As you quoted all my message, I thought it was that sense.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

Do you think an avarage Joe is looking for a Jolla?
He is fine with Samsung or Apple or always mentioning why "it doesnt work like on Android or IOS".

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

But that's what Jolla Ltd wants, I guess. And all those nice features we are loosing* in Sailfish 2.0 (swipe left-right in covers, push down to close app...) are meant to atract Average Joes.

Let's ask it the other way: can we Sheldon Coopers make Jolla Ltd. profitable?



* Fingers crossed. I hope they survive, even as "advanced custom options".

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

All of them tile based. None of them offline. Bah.

god damn not again. nokia did the best maps on portable devices. i just wondered last week that my reinstalled nokia 5530 still recieved fresh online map data. works like a charm. so hell no cares about average joe.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

One of them is offline. Forgot the name. Will look it up later.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

that's very naive thinking. I guess only 1% use openstreet map and only 10% of them contribute. So open street map will be for geeks with half baked maps especially in small countrys such as my country. With 99.9% using google maps.

And about sell Here I am disapointed. Now only a few car manufactors will have access to a good decent map. And as said here already if SFOS has to pay big fees we can soon forget about here on SFOS.

Stupid Nokia :(

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

While the number of OpenStreetMap users is smaller than the number of Google Maps users, don't assume that it is less complete and that contributions are of low quality. OSM is edited not just by casual users who want to contribute something back, but also by companies who are building a business on top of OSM (at my local OSM meetings in Romania I am one of the only people there who is not a professional developer).

And for many small countries, OSM coverage is often more extensive than Google Maps. I spend a lot of time cycling around the Balkans, going down unpaved roads that draw little traffic, and I'm finding more and more that there's nothing left for me to contribute to OSM: other people have already been there and mapped it first, while on Google Maps many of those roads are missing.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

And where are your patches adding offline map rendering ? ;-)

Yep - this is from my experience the main difference between OSM and Google Maps - Google usually has bigger overall coverage but at quite low level of detail. On the other hand while OSM might not cover all areas (which less often by the day), if an area is covered it is usually covered at a much higher level of detail.

Good example are foot paths, walkways or stairs/stairways. underpasses, etc. OSM usually has them, which helps a lot when navigating foreign cities, but Google usually has only routes passable by cars and no pedestrian ways at all.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

While OSM might not be as complete as GoogleMaps (or Nokia) (well, it highly depends on the area. some areas have high quality maps donated by governments or companies. In my area, it really has usually better coverage than Nokia one which lacks a lot in details).

But, it is not my point. The point is that I think if community is going to back some mapping, OSM probably deserves it more than any other commercial solution. It is really unfortunate that Google receives many contributions form people while (AFAIK) it has restricted licensing. What I lack personally is a good application with proper "offline" working support: so that I can tell it to download full map of my area and then work offline. TBH, I've never tested routing on OSM maps, but if it is lacking we can make it better too!

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

Touché! ;)

But, frankly, most people do not have the capacity to fix software by themselves. Even those who do, do not always have the time. There are only so many hours in a day. Consequently, if a product does not fit their needs entirely, they just move on. This is not about any specific case, it is a general observation of why more people do not flock towards the open-source nirvana.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

[QUOTE=hedayat;1479050]While OSM might not be as complete as GoogleMaps (or Nokia) (well, it highly depends on the area. some areas have high quality maps donated by governments or companies. In my area, it really has usually better coverage than Nokia one which lacks a lot in details).
]

Thing is its far from complete compared to HERE and GMaps.

Ofcourse it is but that's the main problem. Normal people does not give a **** about licensing. They only use apps that is easy to use and easy to contribute. AFAIK those apps that exists for OSD is not user friendly in the first place. Thats is a must to success. Make apps that look good and is easy to navigate/use or else no one will use it except some FOSS people.

What they want is a decent good navapp and good maps in the first place. Last time I tried to take a look at the API it was not even near stable. Maybe this has changed lately.

But the apps OSD apps for Jolla is definitivly no go so far.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

[QUOTE=hedayat;1479050]While OSM might not be as complete as GoogleMaps (or Nokia) (well, it highly depends on the area. some areas have high quality maps donated by governments or companies. In my area, it really has usually better coverage than Nokia one which lacks a lot in details).

OSM is far more complete and accurate than Google or Nokia maps. It just lacks good applications that are user friendly and can cache maps locally.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

Both OSM and Google Maps are broken and outdated in my city. And I do live in a big city in The Netherlands. I've tried to contribute to OSM but after a while of fixing things I got yelled at by some long-time contributors and they've really discouraged me to contribute any further. So my city's still partly broken and outdated at this point.

So no, I won't recommend OSM. And neither do I recommend Google Maps for the broken/outdated reason.

HERE is pretty good in my city, so is Bing Maps (strangely enough!).

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

I took a look at the developer API and remember why I stopped my intrests in OSD.

They STILL use XML as response API. Who the hell use XML this days.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

That would not concern me at all. I would be MUCH more concerned if they changed the API three times a year because the new format is the current fashion of the month.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

Bing is pretty good in the UK too, if only because they have the OS layer.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

Pretty much irrelevant though. You wouldn't write a mapping app that used just one mapping back end these days so you'd probably abstract that anyway so you could switch datasets.

Most of the problem I have with OSM seems to be the really awful apps that use it compared to the commercial offerings. HERE and Google maps win because their apps are pretty good with generally well thought out UI. Compare them to OSMAnd, often the poster boy for OSM but perhaps one of the worst UIs I've ever come across in the entire history of apps. I've got mapping apps written for MSDOS that are more intuitive.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

Sadly, bad UI is a common plague of most so-called open-source applications :(
Another one is appalling or non-existent documentation; that one affects libraries as well as applications.

Re: HERE Maps has been sold
 

Should not be an issue, the current XML API (v0.6) has been deployed back in 2009 and looks like it has been stable since then.

BTW, unless you are interested in writing an OpenStreetMap editor, you don't usually care about this API.

For writing OSM using navigation apps you usually use some of the third party APIs:

• POI search - like Nominatim
• routing - like OSRM
• parametric data search/dumping - like Overpass API

Please note all of these backends are open source sou you (or anybody else) can setup a new instance if the default one/ones go down for some reason.

This is quite an important difference to the Google provided APIs, that have no open backend and you are at mercy of them not breaking the API every week.

Also quite often you don't care that much about APIs and just use a dump of the OSM data (in the fast to process PBF format) and generate routing data or vector maps for your app from the dump. For example modRana does this for Monav ofline routing data.

Geofabrik provides nice and up-to-date data extracts for most countries. Alternatively you can also make your own extracts directly from the planet wide data dump - its actually quite easy. :)

So, please no ZOMG XML!!111 FUD...