Notices

Thanks for the Info, guys!

@rinigus, the thunderforest transport map, is it a tile map or a vector map? If its the former, can be change to the vector maps or aren't they covered with the free API keys?

I do not know the answer but having read the description in your link, I do not really see the point of "vector tiles". The whole point of a vector map is that you can have a large area - preferably a whole country - covered in a single map. If you have to break it up to tiles anyway then you may as well have them in a raster form. Perhaps the only advantage of "vector tiles" is that you may not need them stored for different zoom levels - provided they indeed work that way. The description does not make that clear.

@pichlo, vector tiles can be smoothly scaled between zoom levels, consume less bandwidth for equivalent resolution, and can be rotated / zoomed with labels staying visible and legible.

@pichlo, this is a Vector Maps API providing "vector tiles" by an online map service!

Thunderforest would be a very bad online-map provider, if you would have to download Gigabytes ("a large area" as you suggested) for displaying the small map section on your screen.

Vector tiles can be considered as small databases containing features within the tile. As such, vector tiles contain these features "rendered" taking into account zoom level at which they are used. There are positive and negative aspects of this approach, but, in the end, looks like positives (fast and on-device rendering of the maps) outweigh the negatives (having the same data included in multiple tiles along zoom levels, long imports of data). [stressing positives and negatives is my take, not very thorough, probably].

Now, while we can get access to vector tiles with the layers described, we also need stylesheets that would process the data and result in a map that you could see. For example, Mapbox GL styles that you see come with a stylesheet that refers to vector tile data on mapbox server. Same with OSM Scout Server: styles (https://github.com/rinigus/osmscout-...apboxgl/styles , generated from https://github.com/rinigus/mapbox-gl-styles) are referring to layers in vector tiles served by the server.

I haven't seen any stylesheets provided by Thunderforest. Which probably means that we have to design it using their data. For that, one could read up on styles (https://docs.mapbox.com/studio-manual/reference/styles/) and use Mapbox Studio or some other tool to generate the style. If the style will be available, I don't mind adding it to Pure Maps

Yes, I know about the zooming. I even mentioned it in my post. The doubt that I expressed was based on the fact that a tile at a higher zoom level would store information for a smaller area. If you do not want different tiles for different zoom levels, then you have to choose a suitably low zoom level as a base, like a whole country or even bigger. But then you have the opposite problem, too much information in the tile. If you still have to download tiles for different zoom levels (which, if I understand rinigus' post correctly, is the case), then the difference in bandwidth is IMO negligible and hardly worth the extra code the client would have to contain.

The rotation and labeling are good points through, I admit I had missed that.

Hello everyone, I come from the Purism forum, regarding the Librem 5. I discovered Pure Maps during a discussion about navigation app for Android and Linux and by installing the Flatpak on my computer, I understood that Linux finally had one of the best open-source GPS navigation software. Congratulations and thank you for this wonderful app.

However, I have three questions to ask:

1. Is it still relevant that a version for Librem 5 is in progress?
2. About HERE maps, do the maps transmit our user data to HERE servers? How is it possible to display this maps which is proprietary (unless I am mistaken) without any compensation?
3. Are there any GPS with Pure Maps that can be purchased in stores?

Thanks again for the excellent work done, I was amazed by the ergonomics and efficiency of this software.

@prog-amateur - welcome to TMO!

Good questions, let me reply:

1. Yes, version for L5 and Sailfish OS are both developed. This goes for Pure Maps and OSM Scout Server. I am planning to support the both platforms when L5 will get out and, with the current implementation, it should be easy (kind of easy) to add other QML platforms. By supporting more platforms, hope is to get more developers and pro-active users on board and get help with the work on this solution.

2. HERE Maps is competing with Google. So, they have made an attractive offer for developers to get as many of them to work on their platform. As a result, we can get rather large allowance of free downloaded tiles from them. We could expand it to routing and search as well, but it may require further compartmentalization of HERE into separate profile for legal reasons.

3. Not yet. You can buy any phone or tablet supported by Sailfish and install Pure Maps on it. Or any Linux device that you may consider as a GPS device. I wonder if RPi with touchscreen and GPS would do the trick.

As for traffic or location data, your location info is not transmitted from Pure Maps to the used services. Traffic is provided by HERE via their raster map tiles; Mapbox also gives the data as a part of their datasets. We are so far operating within free limits, that we hit once in a while. For Mapbox data, users are encouraged to register their own access codes.

When using online services, you do request map tiles, perform search or routing request on their server. So, in theory, some data can be processed regarding you. Although, it has to be tracked by your IP address, if possible. Providers usually have legal description of what can they do with it, if anything, and you can consult it too.

Finally, Pure Maps sits on top of Qt. So, if Qt is compromised and sends the data somewhere regarding your location, this cannot be avoided by Pure Maps. Although, I have never heard about such incidents and it would correspond to the compromised device - something that applications running on top of the OS cannot do much about.

Thank you very much for that detailed answer. Is there a link/tutorial to install offline maps? (I have the Flatpak version on my laptop).
Thanks again.