Notices

ah, geeez, we are talking about vertical alignment to a horizontal center line then, right? mix up much.

Even so it looks better with the Top Row having some space to the edge. I think it is a waste of usable space. I want to see as much as possible from the direction I'm heading to. Maybe it woudl be better to omit the round edges and leave it there where @pichlo placed it. Without round edges it shouldn't look that forced to the top.

@pichlo: Great work so far!

I agree. In practice, you want to keep as much vertical space as possible.

I was also thinking about 2 different modes with the respect of on map controls:

* full mode where all controls are visible
* minimal mode, with only the required ones on screen.

For example, in minimal mode,
* the north arrow would be shown only if the map is rotated,
* scale is shown only while its changed (maybe keep it while driving),
* center not shown,
* mph/yd not shown (this could be removed for navigation anyway - speed is shown separately).
* copyright - not sure, we probably have to keep it somewhere

To toggle between modes, you would just hit a map on a place without POIs, with the minimal being default thats triggered after a short pause on start.

Hence centering around possibly missing elements is not needed.

@pichlo: I would love to keep remaining distance and time. The latter one is the only way to keep sanity of the driver while bringing kids to the scout camp.

ETA and remaining time are two ways of expressing the same thing.

My longer-term plan is to keep the visual as it is, with as little distraction as possible, but making it configurable. So you can choose whether for example the third element shows ETA, remaining time or remaining distance.

I am with you, but.
For me the most precious info is located in a square around the current position.
The top most and outer edges do not matter much for orientation.
In case the outer edges matter is solely to indicate if the rout exceeds the current view range or not. For that info, the top spacing even gives more info than to have a bar that blocks view to the top most pixels completely.
But it is a minor discussion. For me there is a big importance in overall look to have an eyecandy experience. That was the reason i had to jiggle around with pichlos proposal.

Coming back to my important "square around" the current location, somtimes i find the menu icon (the 9 dots) blocking the view on complex turns in cities that go "behind" the current postion. So sometimes the route is diplayed beneth the dots.
I guess the minimal mode rinigus mentioned would be nice +++ if highly configurable

It's funny how different people perceive one and the same thing. For me It's mostly uninteresting what lies behind me. I want to be informed what lies in front of me as far as possible and as detailed as possible. So I prefer a higher zoom factor and as much space as possible above my actual position.

By the way, it seems like you haven't listened to your driving instructor.
At least mine told me always that "vorausschauendes Fahren" (anticipatory driving) is the most important thing when you are driving in a car.

Not in situations where "behind" (below) your location on the map is actually in front regarding the route to take some turns later?
I have that most often in cologne. "The city of the 3 rings" you can not cross easily but have to frequently u-turn and sharp turn in multiple "P's" when starting a route out of the city

So anticipated driving some turns earlier is exactly what i like to have in all instances and edge cases.

But this can be solved by intelligent automatic zoom relative to speed which is already on rinigus list as i see some posts earlier.

Just a quick report. I finally got to use Pure Maps in a real-life situation, i.e. my vacation. The rental car also had GPS installed, so it was easy to compare the two. The routing of Pure Maps was far superior. Even though, I had asked the car GPS for the quickest routes, it kept sending us through tiny residential streets and steep mountain roads. Pure Maps' routing showed us much more sensible alternatives.

Talking about mountain roads, how about a feature to block certain roads for routing? There was one road in particular that was a nightmare. Thus, I would have appreciated a detour.

Another feature that could be helpful might be a zoom on crossroads and roundabouts when approaching them. For example, there was a roundabout with seven exits. Seeing it in more detail beforehand would have helped a lot.

As for roundabouts, is it possible to augment the spoken directions to indicate the general direction of the exit? For example, instead of "enter the roundabout, third exit", it could say "go straight|turn left|slightly left|sharp left in the roundabout, third exit". It's a lot easier if you know which direction you are going for.

Also, is it possible to make Pure Maps/Mimic "speak" at will? Maybe it could repeat the last instruction (or an update of it) when a certain part of the screen is touched? This way one could test whether voice navigation is working (i.e. whether the bluetooth connection to the car is functional).

I noticed a curious Mimic ideosyncracy: It turns Roman numerals into letters such as aye-aye-aye. :-)

By the way, talking of Mimic: I noticed that it doesn't seem to pronounce "special characters" like letters with accents or umlauts. Would it be possible for Pure Maps to detox the street names it sends to Mimic, i.e. replacing diacritics/accents/umlauts with the closest letter - e.g. "rue Théâtre" into "rue Theatre" (now it's read as "rue Thtre", which sounds pretty rough and is hard to recognize)?

Bottom line, OSM Scout Server and Pure Maps are everything I could have hoped for. Great job indeed!!!

I find picotts generally much better than mimic. Worth trying.

https://openrepos.net/content/pichlo...e-ui-pure-maps

Due to the nature of the patch, it is highly version specific. This one currently works only with Pure Maps 1.7.1.
Please test and feedback. Feel free to shred it to bits.