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skanky is offline skanky
2015-08-10 , 08:48
Posts: 188 | Thanked: 308 times | Joined on Jan 2013 @ UK
#31
Originally Posted by vistaus View Post
Both OSM and Google Maps are broken and outdated in my city.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 So my city's still partly broken and outdated at this point.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 And neither do I recommend Google Maps for the broken/outdated reason.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!).
Bing is pretty good in the UK too, if only because they have the OS layer.
 
aegis is offline aegis
2015-08-10 , 09:20
Posts: 702 | Thanked: 2,059 times | Joined on Feb 2011 @ UK
#32
Originally Posted by mikecomputing View Post
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.
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.
 

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pichlo is offline pichlo
2015-08-10 , 10:21
Posts: 6,453 | Thanked: 20,983 times | Joined on Sep 2012 @ UK
#33
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.
 
MartinK is offline MartinK
2015-08-10 , 10:21
Posts: 1,548 | Thanked: 7,510 times | Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic
#34
Originally Posted by pichlo View Post
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.
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:

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...
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modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
Mieru: a flexible manga and comic book reader
Universal Components - a solution for native looking yet component set independent QML appliactions (QtQuick Controls 2 & Silica supported as backends)
 

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