Notices

Has anyone else continued to play with the Navit SVN builds? I've been playing with them on a daily basis but so far haven't found Navit to be very useful yet. I'm wondering if anyone else is playing with the builds and if they have found it to be useful for them or not.

My main frustration is really in the slowness of Navit. I also am unable to enter in addresses as destinations for routing (My city comes up in the searching but apparently there are no streets in Las Vegas...)

If I remember correctly I believe that gerritv was taking a three month trip and thus wouldn't be making any more contributions upstream. Is anyone other than him working on Navit for the tablets?

Also, does anyone play around with Roadmap at all? Although it has many limitations I find myself using it the most because of it's speed on the tablet as compared to Navit. I also like the fact that it has a gui to change it's settings versus Navits xml file (although developers do intend to eventually add this to Navit).

Overall I think Navit has the most potential for being the GPS solution we are looking for but it seems that the tablets will be pretty outdated by the time a working solution is finally ready.

Thoughts....

I haven't played with it for a while. The best I can do is bug reports The xml files aren't bad, once you get used to them, not very user friendly though.

My biggest problem is lack of accurate maps for my area. I do keep on my tablet, just in case. It could probably get me out of trouble if necessary (maybe not quickly or accurately, but eventually). I think with gerritv out of the picture for a while, the tablets don't have a real advocate working with the Navit developers. I'm not sure what they've been working on lately in that regard, I haven't kept up.

If you have any other questions, I might be able to help.

Overall I like the progress that has been made even without gerritv's direct help for the tablets. I think within the last couple of months the builds have been progressively been getting better. I am a little surprised that there isn't much forum activity regarding Navit on Maemo.org. It would seem that Navit has the potential to rectify one of the short comings of the tablet but strangely there are only a couple of threads regarding it's use in these forums.

Have you been able to enter any addresses for routing purposes? The most I have been able to do is enter in cities. When I try entering street names there are no matches that appear. I've read through the Navit Wiki several times but I cannot find anything obvious that would address why streets do not appear.

I guess my only other frustration would be the font sizes and how they default to such small fonts that they are impossible to read on the tablet. I attempted one time to mess around with the font size tags in the xml file but Navit died on my when I did so. Considering that there was probably a 100 font size tags in there I probably changed something that I wasn't supposed to.

I use it. Its the only map program with offline routing, so its the only one I can use... It is very slow. I am able to enter addresses now, very slowly...

If only roadmap has lock to road and offline routing, it would be perfect.

Thesandlord, Could you descibe how you got the offline routing to work? For whatever reason I can only enter in cities and get matches. When I get to the section for entering a street I never get any matches. As a result I cannot enter a full address and be routed to it. I can click on a place on the map and be routed to it though.

I agree with your thoughts on roadmap, although I would add that the routes you can import should highlight the route with something a little larger than a one pixel red line.

Well, I type in the info, and after a LONG time, it works. It seems to freeze, but it is doing something. Sometimes it does not, so I hold down the approximate location, and say set point as destination. Not ideal, but its the best we got.

I use GTK skin.

I'm currently working on C++ code to offer offline rendering of maps and also offer offline routing - both based on openstreetmap data. Currently the map drawing is reasonable good but still needs improvements (that should be simple to make but just needs some time). I will now start wokring on extracting the necessary data from openstreetmap to get routing done.

If anybody is interested to participate or use or integrate don't hesitate to contact me. My code is currently not as advanced as Navit but in my case maemo is the target #1.

Regarding Navit: It is difficult to extract city and especially street information from OSM, since at leats for germany the is no direct releation from the street to the "containing" city. The tagsa are there but they are not always used. Besides possible performance problems this might be the problem Navit may have.

Framstag

I'd love to help however I can (use/test, mostly). After a long hiatus I've reobtained an n810 and am now once more using it extensively.

Navit works, but it is slow (took me a while to figure it was working and not locked up when I typed a few letters of the city name in!). Coverage is not perfect, but that's OSM (we could all contribute where we find holes...).

I was paying attention, but have been crazily busy with work and other things. Add to that my lack of any C++ knowledge and I was unable to do much to help. I have been sort of following the svn updates. but I find it tends to crash for me now if I set a destination. I still think it has the most potential, and I would love to see it become usable on my n810. For the moment it is largely relegated to browsing maps of an area, rather than routing etc.

Smarsh: if you want to help I'm sure the guys on the IRC channel #navit will be glad to hear it.

I was on the #Navit IRC channel this morning and chatted a touch with CP15 one of the developers. He's been pretty helpful in helping me figure out why I can't get any streets to pull up. He noted that there are some issues with some of the icons and said he would try to address it.

When things get settled down I'd like to get more involved with the Navit project with bug reporting and such. It would be my first active involvement in an OSS project. Sadly I don't have the coding skills to contribute where it counts but I can still test for them.

Oh, CP15 said he was going to test Navit out on his N800 tomorrow to see if he can reproduce some of the errors I'm getting. I'm not sure if it's what he uses all of the time for Navit or if he just happens to have one of the devices lying around to play around with.