ChristianK

The evolution of the world overview maps

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For two years after the Nov 2016 edition of the world overview maps I have worked on the curation of additional content to be put on top of the variouis background maps for the different zoom levels. Why ? I am a curious traveler to places where “always on” is (still) a lie. In the case of interest in something about a country or region or province, too much jumping back and forth from offline Wikipedia (like Aard2 or Kiwix) is annoyance. So, I put a number of information directly into the world overview maps:
– The capitals of countries, states and provinces of many countries are shown in 3 different colours, in English and local language (if significantly different).
– Islands and archipelagos, in particular the remote ones, are hard to spot on maps – here is remedy by highlighting them, from zoom level 3 up.
– Triggered by an OAM forum discussion about visibility of peaks, and with the help of Max’ algorithm to select, 100s of important peaks are highlighted.
– Also the major ocean deeps are shown.

Some insights into the process: the current MOBAC rendering tool with the Mapsforge library embedded does not provide a proper visibility of labels like settlement names. Even big cities may not show up at all. Using Maperitive in addition allows to take control of the label renditions in a predictable way. Unfortunately, Maperitive has a bug omitting the leftmost or rightmost of a label for a fraction of a label. Playing with scope and zoom around the affected place the missing parts can be added in a manual patch step (at least for the most visible cases like highlighted capitals – I hope I caught those all). Once you go this route, this opens an additional option: make larger settlements dominate the label display in a much more accurate way than the simple city-town-village-… attributes in OSM would allow. Hence now also the size of the settlement labels increases by population (in 11 catagories), if provided in the OSM data set (hopefully correctly!), otherwise a minimum assumption is made for the OSM categories city, town and village. As Maperitive is an OSM tool, this is achieved by amending the original data with categories of population sizes. Those “PopCat” tags are now also embedded in Christian’s OAM maps. They can be used by themes to select (restrict) the settlement names to be displayed. The adaption of the latest Elevate theme is on my list for 2018, but maybe somebody else is faster :-)

Bottom line: the intent behind all that is to have essential geo information at a finger tip, fully OFFLINE. A sort of companion for Offline Wikipedia. Enjoy!

Michael Bechtold

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Tobias

Changes in Elevate map style in last few months

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Elevate updates don’t bring huge changes anymore, but smaller ones, that, when added up, make a big difference altogether. Therefore once again the hint here that only with current map styles and maps all improvements get visible. Recently those were important changes in Elevate, and some smaller ones as well. Look at the legend for further information.

  • a new overlay for extended road surface information
  • new via ferrata rendering
  • solid/dashed borders for cycleways
  • changed visibility information for paths without sac_scale
  • prominent peaks are now shown earlier and, if the app supports it, are prioritized
  • hiking waycolor is displayed along waymarks
  • the overlay contents have been rearranged a bit
  • access limits are much more accurate to the mode of transportation the map style is made for

The newest downloads and the changelog can be found as always on the Elevate page, and for e-mail notifications for further updates of Elevate just subscribe to this thread in the forum.

Best regards,
Tobias

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ChristianK

Yet another year is drawing to a close…

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Dear members of the OpenAndroMaps community,

another year is drawing to a close, already the sixth year for OAM.

Time to say “thanks” to all the people contibuting new, better Data for OAM like
@Sonny constantly integrates new LIDAR (LaserScan) elevation data, wherever available for free, into the existing viewfinder/nasa dataset – resulting in the most reliable contourlines available on free maps.
@MaxBe who found a way to sort mountain peaks by “importance” so we could render the important ones in lower zoom-levels – an improvement that is included in the december map update.

I also like to thank all users who made the effort to register in our forum and give hints, suggestions and error reports. This is very important for us as we can be routine-blinded or just lack the time to test every map update for errors. Although our standard is and can only be absolutely professional, we do all this in our rare spare time and with only a tiny budget.

Our goal is to sustain and enhance this project and ask you kindly to further support us.

The OAM team wishes you all a merry christmas!

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ChristianK

Was have happened at OAM till Nov 2017?

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Yes, I know..

Kommunikation from my side to the OpenAndroMaps community could – and should – be better (by far) ;-)

A lot of improvements happened during 2017  – OAM is’nt on idle at all, we are working hard to improve, add new Features, include external Data, aso..

Here a small overview about improvements so far in 2017:

Maps:

  • Abbreviations for Street / Place names in many languages for more reliable rendering (eg Street / Strasse > St.)
  • Better rendering of cycletracks and lanes along roads
  • Put_in / regress / portage_ways for paddlers included in map_data
  • @Sonny constantly integrates new LIDAR (LaserScan) elevation data, wherever available for free, into the existing viewfinder/nasa dataset – resulting in the most reliable contourlines available on free maps.
  • @Tobias constantly improves the Elevate / Elements rendertheme.
  • Constant evolution of the multilanguage maps > now (eg) PidginChines works reliable
  • Better redering of access rights and road surfaces
  • Difficult scale (sac_scale) for mountain paths without restrictions
  • Names for Islands / Archipelagos now render much better and at lower zoom levels – appearence is driven by calculated size of area covered
  • @Michael works for a better set of GeneralMaps
  • …

Website:

  • Server moved to new, more reliable provider with up to date infrastructure
  • Protokoll moved to HTTPS
  • New version of WordPress theme with much better apperance and faster rendering on mobile devices
  • aso..

 

However the best of all is about to come.
December update will bring a real great improvement for hikers and alpinists.

 

Best regards
Team of OAM

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ChristianK

[done] OpenAndroMaps website switches to HTTPS/SSL this week

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The OpenAndroMaps website will switch to secure transfer protocoll  according HTTPS / SSL this week.

This step is required by the Google guidlines to provide the HTTPS / SSL for all sites that require user inputs such as comments, user accounts, or forums.
This is an important step ahead in data security, which has been supported on the side of OpenAndroMaps since long by flanking, server-side actions like Intruderdedection, protection against BruteForce attacks and integration into various blacklists.

 

UPDATE 2017-08-22 18:00h MEZ: Done, the Website is running on fine on SSL, no mixed contend any more – we have a green lock-symbol on all pages. I  have tested all functions and have’nt found any bug. However, if you experience problems please post here as comment or in the forum.

Best regards, Christian

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ChristianK

Please update your Renderthemes !

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With the update of the maps next week there are critical changes in the structure of the maps. The difficulties of the mountain paths are rendererd slightly different (the sac_scale).
The renderthemes are now prepared for this change, please install these updated themes.

Link to Tiramisu Theme

Elevate/Elements Theme install

Openandromaps_HC theme

Please update your themes, otherwise the sac_scale of the mountain paths will be rendered wrong !!

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ChristianK

IMPORTANT CHANGES for Themes (tag-mapping)

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Hi,

This is an information for Theme-Composers.
There will be an important change in tag-mapping for the OpenAndroMaps.

Until today sac_scale was preprocessed to carry only 4 levels:
T1,T2,T3 and T4, while T4 included T5+T6 too.

Now sac_scale will be extended for all levels = T1 – T6 (August update), so seperate levels for T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6

This includes some minor changes:
DAV_SCALE “black” is transformed to SAC_SCALE=T5 (was T4 so far)
If a way includes any “via_ferrata” tag/value SAC_SCALE is set to “T6” (was T4 so far)

_and_
in a second step (October) raw_sac_scale will be no longer supported = removed from Tag-Mapping!

SO: sac_scale T4 will NO LONGER INCLUDE T5+T6 > T5 AND T6 are seperate values from August update on.
THIS MEANS: You have to extend existing rules for sac_scale=T4 to “sac_scale”=”T4|T5|T6”
AND existing rules for “raw_sac_scale” have to be extended to “sac_scale|raw_sac_scale”

Please prepare your themes.

This have to be made in a 2-step process:

Extend your rules so that sac_scale prozesses T5 and T6 too.
So if you have a rule :

extend it to:

from October on you can create additional, seperate rules for T5/T6

If you use a raw_sac_scale, extend the rules:

So everyone making themes for OpenAndroMaps have to ensure that everything renders fine when expanding the sac_scale and finally deleting raw_sac_scale. I know its annoying – however there is no other way to ensure that the maps render fine in future.

Additional TAGS that will be removed from tag-mapping by end of October:

  • raw_sac_scale (as mentioned above)
  • incline_dir
  • class_bicycle_mtb, class_bicycle_road (maybe we find a solution to transform _mtb to existing tags)
  • noexit

I’m terribly sorry about this, however recently I discovered that there is a limit of max. 15 Tags in the MapsforgeWriter per OSM_Object so I have to reduce the amount of tags – otherwise we end up in white tiles rendering the maps at is was the case with parts of upper Austria last weeks.

See discussion of this issue at MapsforgeDevGroup:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/mapsforge-dev/kQKfCMGk2Ec

Best regards
Christian

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ChristianK

Multilingual Maps available

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Multilingual maps- what does this mean?

As an example: The OpenStreetMap database provides NAMES for most objects like Citys, Roads, Churches, Rivers, aso.. in different languages. So for the map of Israel usually in hebrew, arabian, english, maybe in german. For maps of Russia usually in russian and english.

Up to now only one language per maps was possible to include and display on our smartphones.
So providing two languages for one maps for OAM meant making –  and for you, downloading two different maps.

With the new, multilingual maps it is possible to include different languages while making the map and switching map-language in an APP – if an APP is compatible with these maps AND provides a language switcher. This is the case for ORUXMAPS and LOCUS for Android and Cruiser for Android + PC.

Here you see a small screencast of ORUXMAPS switching between russian and englich using the map of Moscow:

Orux-Multilingual_Maps_OAM[EN]

So we decided to provide the multilingual maps on OpenAndroMaps.
The effort for providing two different versions of the maps (old single and new multilingual = 250 each) is crazy.
However, we are aware that a lot of APPs still only support the old “V3” single-language maps – and keeping our users in mind we will support both versions for while, as far and long as our resources will allow this.

For now we provide the new multilingual “V4” maps for download to PC AND for direct install to ORUXMAPS. The download/install buttons for these maps are RED, the included languages are shown for each map as abbreviations in square brackets. The new map files itself are identified by a “_ML” suffix.
So, eg., while the name of old map is “Germany.map” the name of the multilingual map is “Germany_ML.map”

For more information klick here

The old maps that we provided in different languages will be available in future only in one language (usually native lang. or english) – this is the case for all russian mapps, several maps for Asia aso. PLUS the multilingual version.

The POI files for the multilingual maps are included in the zip-files of the maps. With the next update of ORUXMAPS these POI-files will be installed in the right place on your Smartphone if chose direct install.

 

Next posting will deal with the complete redesign of the categorie-structure of the OpenAndroMaps POI-files.

Best regards
Tobias & Christian

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ChristianK

OAM – Website has moved to new Server

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The planed “maintenance” of the OpenAndroMaps website ended up in renting a new, performant server with the latest operating system in a fast network …..

Furthermore, several overweight plugins were exchanged against lightweight ones from GitHub and everything was adapted to run under PHP7 – this should be fine for the next months.

The advantage for you: fast response times (around the 400ms load time) after I have spent a full weekend with the memcached server  :-).
The page rendering times on Android is not so nice, unfortunately this is a common problem on these devices.

SPAM: I’v installed a new Spam-Protection. Please dont use disposal EMail addresses, this will not work.

Now we can concentrate on the real thing: Making maps, pois, themes, docs.
Maybe some of you have already seen that multilingual maps now available for download – we will present these maps in brief later on.

See you
Christian

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ChristianK

From 7th of March better map starting positions

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Dear OpenAndroMaps Community!

 

Unitl now the map starting position after loading a new map was set to the arithmetical center of the area the map covered.
Unfortunatelly sometimes, at high zoom levels and with GPs device disabled, you ended up in the blue sea or in the middle of nowhere after loading a map.

From now on every map has its own starting position set by hand – usually the capital of the country/region or a well known natural preserve or something like this.

As an example: Loading a fresh map of Cannary Islands – until know you ended up in the blue sea, from now on the map starting point will be N28,46560°  W16,25398° = Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

This improvement is the reason why the update for March is delayed for a few days – the map starting points for ~270 maps have to be defined. The updated maps should be available from 7th of March on starting with Europe/Germany.

 

best regards
Tobias & Christian

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