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Episode: 1474
Title: HPR1474: A behind the Curtain Look at OsmAnd (OSM Automated Navigation Directions) with Pokey and David
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1474/hpr1474.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 03:50:10
---
🎵
Today is February 24th, 2014, and I'm talking to Poki, and we're going to be talking about
a software project called Osman OS M-A-N-D. Good evening. Well, Poki, I heard through another
HPR episode that you actually use a paper map sometimes for navigation. I used to. I used
to use paper maps and awful lot more than I do now. I used to carry one with me. I always
have one in the car. I mean, there's always one, you know, for whatever state. I mean,
if I can get one, I've got one in the car. I used to carry one with me all the time on my
motorcycle. I've got them tacked the wall around my office just because I like maps. And
then like when I was a motorcycle rider, I'd come home from a weekend of exploring and riding
roads I'd never been on before. And I'd highlight the ones that I rode. So for my state
in New Hampshire, I've got most of the state highlighted and a lot of the surrounding
states as well. But I don't use a paper map too, too much anymore, though I do know how
to use them. Even like top old maps, I can do elevation stuff on trails that way. That's
not that bad. But typically now I'm using some kind of software to do mapping. Well, personally,
I really like paper map and atlas. And I have a bit of a collection of them. And when I go
to visit a place, I usually pick up a local map and I keep those in a file. But I see the
advantage of using an electronic device at GPS because it locates you. And there's a lot
more information in it. And you can paste you and get to it real easy. And so, you know,
here are you talk about that. And I think you mentioned Osmond when I heard this HPR episode
where you said that. And so I contacted you to see if you would want to get together
with me and talk about this. And so Osmond is global mobile map viewing and navigation
for offline and online OSM maps. I was going to look here and see the name Osmond navigation
routing based on open street map for Android devices project. I was trying to find the
actual name for it here to point out what the acronym actually stands for.
Yeah. Again, I forget. I can never remember that one because the A&D, maybe they changed
it. Maybe now it is for Android, but didn't used to be. And it was something just a little
a little odd to remember. If you're switching over from paper maps to electronic maps, I'll
tell you what. When I did that, the one thing about it that I found really, really frustrating
is I don't have any devices that are a foot and a half tall and 12 inches wide to view
a map on and it's so frustrating not being able to see a large piece of area for my electronic
devices. They're simply, for the most part, they're simply for navigation. If I have to look
at a big map and it's electronic, I need a monitor for that. I got to go home and sit
down at the computer or look at a paper map. Yeah, I'm with you on that. I like to have
the large format and to be able to look, you know, at different areas and fold the map
and be able to kind of pick out where I'm at. I did find here where it talks about the
name for Osman. It's OSM automated navigation directions. So it's integrated with OpenStreetMap
really. Yeah, that's a really nice thing about it is it is, in my opinion, the navigation
software for people who use OpenStreetMap, it may not be the best thing out there for everyone.
There's different navigation softwares out there and devices and people have their own
preferences about it. But if you're a person who uses and edits OpenStreetMap as far as
I can tell, this is the only one that lets you use OpenStreetMap data. So your data,
your edits in a device that navigates you offline. This thing, you pre-cash the maps and
it's got built-in routing, which a lot of the other things that I've tried over the years
either didn't pre-cash the maps or couldn't do their own routing. They had to get their
routing done from some server online somewhere. I'm pretty sure Google maps didn't
use to have any routing locally. If you were offline, you were stuck. It seemed like
offline routing because it would update them whenever you had Wi-Fi signal to stop light
if it was before phones or something like that. I think, if I'm remembering correctly,
and then there was another one that I used to use on my N810 and I don't remember the
name of that navigation software, but that couldn't do its own routing. You had to have
a Wi-Fi signal or a cell signal if it was the N810 with the cell chip in it. It had to call
out for that navigation, couldn't do it locally. If you veered off track, it could not recalculate.
If you were one road over, you had to find your way back to the track. It was recommending for you.
I'm interested in this offline routing and especially taking data out of OpenStreetMaps
or OpenStreetMap. I know the HPR episode that Ken did, Bostamp Part 1 episode 1447. There's an
interview with a Frenchman in there about OpenStreetMap who is corrected. It's not OpenStreetMaps.
I do a bit of mountain biking around and so I'm in the forest and going up logging roads in that
and actually into trails that are sometimes just animal trails. I like to try to get a track of
that so that I can share with other people so that the ability to edit the map and then be able
to share that is really important to me. I'm really happy to have found this Osmond, basically GPS
program. Yeah, I don't do a lot of mountain biking. I did a bit when I was a kid. Mostly now it's
hiking. I don't even really use Osmond for that. I use OSM tracker. I use because that'll display
the map. Again, you need a cell signal or you need to pan around while you still get Wi-Fi
and pre-cache that. That's what I use for track or just because it handles all the uploading and
handles point-to-point notes and stuff. I don't think that that's fast enough to use mountain
bike. I think you're right that Osmond is the one for that. Plus you can do bicycle settings in
Osmond. It's got different modes, car mode, walking mode, bicycle mode. You've mentioned this
is that you can use this offline. It is essentially if you have a device with a GPS that collects
a GPS signal that can use this program, you basically have a GPS now with a base map and actually
an editable map or a map that you edited. You can have a local map right on your device just
like you downloaded something and this is a free project. It's licensed GPLV3.
Yep. As far as I know, there are three ways to get Osmond. You can get it from the F-Troid
market. However, that's a much older version than current. Apparently, it's a very difficult
program to compile. To get the latest one, you have to get either the free version or the paid
version from the Google Play Store. The difference between the two is that the free version on the
Play Store only allows you 10 maps or 10 content downloads. The paid version gives you unlimited
content downloads. The free one's great as a trial, but you'll run out of those downloads
pretty quick because the world base map is one. It won't work without it. If you're living in
the United States, your state counts as a download and any other state in the United States counts as
a download. Voices count as downloads. The Wikipedia point of interest file counts as a download
and then when the maps are updated, every update counts as a download. Even if you just download
the base map and you're one state and no voices, no Wikipedia points of interest and you're going
to run out of downloads in less than a year. For other countries, sometimes it's the whole country,
so that's exactly what you'll run into. I paid for it and I was happy to do so. The program's
fantastic. I'm happy to pay good money for good free software. All point out here that I have had
and still do have garment devices. I have two actually. I have one that's a device that you use in
the windshield of your car, which is a car GPS that plugs into the cigarette lighter for power,
and then also I have a handheld garment. I think it's called a 60CX, which is really a good unit,
but the maps alone for these devices are about $100 or more. The license when you support
Osmond is, and I'm looking right at a website now that says it's 5.99 British pounds or about $8
US, so it's really a value. Yeah. The one thing I will point out with Osmond is while it does take
open street map data, it does not take the maps that, well, it doesn't take the like the JPEGs
or BMPs or whatever they are, that you view when you go to the website. It instead downloads
all the data. It takes a snapshot of all the current data and it makes vector-based maps.
That takes a hefty server quite some time to do it. You don't get up to the minute maps with
Osmond. It's just the nature of the beast. You can count it as a downside if you want to or just
a side effect of having vector-based maps, which take up much, much, much less room on your
storage of your device. At the moment, they seem to be updating them about every 10 days. That
process has sped up. It used to be slower, but they seem to keep updating it or upgrading it and
getting the maps out quicker. So if I have to go somewhere and the address isn't on the map,
I try to edit the map far enough out so that my edits will show up on my device. By the time I
head out there next, if not, what you can do is within Osmond itself, you can mark a point and
make it a favorite and just have it navigate you there instead. But until for the most part on
open street map at this time, there's not a whole lot of building numbers and street numbers in
there. So looking up a place by its name or street number isn't always possible right now.
Looking things up by crossroads is a lot more reliable, I would say.
Do you happen to know or can you explain the difference between a vector map and a bit map?
Image map. Not the technical difference. A bit map is basically just literally what it sounds like.
It's a map of pixels, a map of bits on the screen and a value for the color for each of those
pixels for each of those bits. So if you have a 10 by 10 display, you've got 100 pixels and
8 or 16 or whatever the color depth is, you have that many bits of data for each of those 100
pixels. Now if you wanted to do that with a map, you have to do that for the entire area that you
intend to view the map on and you have to do it at every zoom level. So and the closer you zoom in,
of course, the more pixels there are that have to be covered by that bit map. So it's an
exponential problem as you zoom in. Whereas a vector-based map, you've got a bunch of points
and their coordinates on some grid. And as you zoom in, they appear to get further apart,
but that grid stays the same as you zoom in. So you only have one set of points and then the
display has to kind of render them on the fly. I believe is how that works, but since there's
only the one set and since it just happens to know what it's looking at all the time, the storage
space required for a vector-based map is much, much smaller than for a bit map.
So in reality, the vector-based map then has a distinct advantage in that sense that it is
small in storage space, so you don't have to worry about that limitation on your device.
For the most part, I don't think you'd have to worry about that too too much. I still don't
download a whole lot of states that I'm not going to use. Number one, it is wasted space. They're not
insignificantly small. I mean, like my state of New Hampshire is pretty small. I think it was
excuse me, 15 or 20 megabytes, whereas Massachusetts, which isn't, I mean, it's comparable in size,
but there's a heck of a lot more data there or detail there, because there's so many more buildings
and so many more people working on the map, and so much more data was initially uploaded
from the state, I believe, that's 115 megabytes. So it's significantly larger. So I don't
download a whole lot that I'm not using for the storage space, but also because every month when
they update, I'm just wasting somebody's bandwidth. If I update those every month and I'm not using
them, so I don't do that on mine. But Osmond does let you select the directory that you're storing
them to. So if space does become an issue for you, you can just map it to your microSD card.
Yeah, that makes it nice. Then you can just take them in and out as you need them.
Yeah, you can delete them and put them back in. You can do that as well, or you mean taking out
the microSD card? Well, you could do that, or you could move them to a different folder,
and then paste them back in, I suppose, when you needed them. Yeah, nowadays, I just try to buy a
big enough microSD card. So I don't have to worry about it anymore. I find that 16 gigabytes
is plenty for my phone. That's got plenty of room for everything I need. And those are,
I mean, you can get a 16 gigabyte card for about $8 nowadays. So I'm not too worried about that.
Yeah, so I want to talk a little bit about the, I have an Android phone as a device that I've
been using this on just for a few days now. And then also I have a 7-inch Samsung Tab 2.
And so those are the devices that I've downloaded this on. And I want to say I'm really 100%
pleased with its performance. In fact, it has just really thrilled me to be able to get this.
And one of the real important reasons for me to even start looking at something like this is
because while I have used Google for, as a GPS, their mapping system and GPS system in there,
I'm getting a little tired of having my movements logged. And so this I think is a way that I can
avoid that. Would you agree with that? Yeah, if you have it set up right, because it will
by default track you, though it's not uploading that to anybody. Yeah, and that's, yeah, I saw
that in there, that option. So you can get it to where it saves a track as a GPX or you can
have it so that it doesn't so. But I think that's an important thing because in the future,
you never know when someone might come back and say, yeah, I noticed you were over here at a certain
time. And well, you can think that that might not ever be a problem. Why have that information
out there for people just to grab and look at whenever they want? Yeah, absolutely. And I'll throw
in here. David just mentioned GPX. That's a dot GPX file. It's a somewhat standardized way.
I don't, it seemed completely standardized to me, but it's a somewhat standardized way of
placing arbitrary points on a map and potentially labeling them. It's what it's the file output
that you usually get if you take a trace of where you've been and take notes along the way,
but it can also be other things like favorites or points of interest are usually exported
to a GPX file dot GPX file as well. Yeah, and I wasn't really, I'm not up as much as you are,
of course, on the technical aspects of this, but I have saved things in a GPX file before.
You looked at them and I know it's they're pretty easy. You can actually pretty much read them
just by taking them into a text editor and looking at them. Oh, neat. I didn't know that I've
never tried that. Is it like a comma separated values or is line by line maybe? It's kind of like
that XML that comes out when you do a My Tracks with a Google and so it actually gives a location.
Okay, neat. I was I was not aware of that. Yeah, if if someone's going to get new into
Osmond, this thing has a lot of features and it's got multiple screens with lots of features on
each one. So it can be a little confusing all the the features and all the words spaghetti that
can be on the screen at at sometimes with this thing. So you know, at some point I was hoping we
could go over just some settings and maybe make the thing a little more usable for for a person
who's who's new to it if if you want to get to that at some point too. Yeah, let's do that. Let's
talk about the screen and how to set it up and I think we've kind of covered how to download it
by going to the froid market or the Google Play Store for an Android device and it is available
for sure in the Google Play Store because that's where I got it from and I did not notice
in there a place where you could pay for it. There's a free version there but there is
information from the open street map wiki and tells you how to get it and pay for it to get the
full version. Yeah, the paid version is called Osmond Plus and I don't remember what the free
version might be Osmond free. I'm not sure. It is Osmond free. Yeah, so when you first start up
Osmond, you get sort of a welcome screen. It's got a little information bar up top, tells you the
version number has a button for help and a button for clothes and then you get four tabs that
come in around the screen like quadrants almost. The upper left is map, the upper right is search,
the lower left is favorites and the lower right is settings and if you've never used
Osmond before you the first thing you are probably going to want to do is go into the settings tab
and the very top selection there is data management. So if you hit data management,
it will say click here to download or update offline data and that's the first thing that you
want to do. You want to hit that button, let it check for all the maps and then it will give you a
selection of all the things that you are able to download. It takes a few minutes. It's like checking
a repo or maybe not a few minutes, few seconds. Okay, mine just did it while I was talking. You
slide your keyboard out of the way and for some weird reason on mine, I don't know if yours is
like this David, but mine always expands a couple of the menus in here and there never the ones I
want to expand that it always expands like worldwide and topic maps and it always expands
Oceana, which I don't know, I guess it wants me to download Peter's house, I guess.
Yeah, I have noticed that also even though right now I've opened up Osmond in the Galaxy Tab 7
that I have and it didn't do it this time. So yeah, the first thing once you get that open is
to expand the worldwide and topics map and you want to download the world base map. It needs that
to operate. So that's your first download. The next one you can tick off, I do the world altitude
correction. I'm not sure exactly what it does, but it seems to be important. So I do that. It
obviously corrects for altitude, but I don't know what you know how much accuracy or it adds or
inaccuracy would be there if you didn't, but I've got that selected and that's I've never seen
it update. The next menu down that can be expanded or the next two actually are voice packs. So you
can do recorded voices for guidance or you can do a text-to-speech synthesized voice.
And of course the recorded one is more natural and easy to understand and the synthesized one
has the advantage of being able to read out street names whereas the recorded one obviously
cannot. Yeah, and I found sometimes a synthesized voice is a little hard to understand, but you just
have to kind of get into the flow of it. It's like dealing with someone with an accent,
let's see, the United States from the South or even someone that is from a foreign country,
you just kind of got to lay back and get in the flow with them and it's really good. You can get
along with it pretty easily after that. Yeah, I agree. I typically use the synthesized voices as well.
The next thing down is the worldwide Wikipedia POIs or points of interest. The English Wikipedia
at least, that's a very large file compared to the rest of the things you might download here.
That's at the moment, it's 313 megabytes and I want to make a quick note here as well. When you see
once you've downloaded something or a file and you check against it to see if there's a new
a version, it's white if you have not downloaded it. It's green if you have and it's current and
it's blue if there's an update available and I think that whether or not there's an update
available, I think it must check it against like a timestamp because sometimes it gets it wrong,
as opposed to a version number because sometimes it gets it wrong. I'm looking at my English
Wiki edition and it says there's a new one available from 2012-1122, whereas the one that I have
is 2012-1121 and I think that that's simply a time zone difference because I can download that
again and it will say the same thing again. It will say 2012-1121, so if you look at one that's
blue and you're going to update it but it's only a day off, don't even bother updating it, that's,
again, I think it's just a time zone difference and it's an error that it's showing up as blue.
If you open the worldwide Wikipedia POIs and scroll down to the English one, right?
I'm seeing WorldSkiMap, I see that altitude correction. Oh no, it's in a, you're in a different
expanded, what are they called, topics maybe. So squish that one back up and scroll down below where
the voice packs are and it should say worldwide Wikipedia POIs just above Europe and just below
the voice packs. So scroll down to anyone that you've already downloaded, whether it's green or blue
and if you look in the description of what you have it will say like for instance if I go US
Maine North America edition 2014-02-22 and that's what I have on my device and then on the right hand
column it says 2014-02-22 30.8 megabytes that's telling you what the current available version is.
Every once in a while you'll see where what you have the version that you have installed
and the version that is available is only one day off and no matter how many times you update that
it's still going to show up, it's still going to tell you that you can update it but it's not,
it's just an error in the date code I think or a time zone or something. Yeah if they're like 10 days
off go ahead and upload it because then it takes that long to update the maps anyway but so yeah as
you're opening your new device and you're setting it up now go down through the regions that
you're interested in having for me it's North America. I'll open North America and download
my state and the three or four surrounding states that I might visit. If you're from Texas and
you're in the middle of it that might be all you need. Once you download those then you're ready to
use the features of the device in earnest. Okay so we've got the maps, the map downloaded or
worldwide base map and a map of the area we're interested in so what would you say is the next
thing someone would like to do should do? I always like to go through the settings of a piece of
software or a device that I buy so I would suggest backing up to the main the main settings menu
then it's a settings as a title. Data management we've already been as the first one the next one
is general. I like to go in general and poke around in there and to see what the features are and
kind of guess at the way that I might like it to operate. Okay so I see here and we see the default
profile is the browse map and my use of this program. Notice that it has a world globe when you get
to the map and then it also has a car bicycle and a walking person so the default profile is the
browse map so some of the features then or the features are enabled for the mode that you have or
the default profile is that right? Not exactly. Here in this menu where you select your default profile
that will just tell you what profile or what mode it's going to be and when you first open the program
there is another place we'll get to that later where you set up your preferences for each of those
profiles but for now that's just asking what you wanted to open as and I have mine set to
open as browse map as well just because usually that's what I'm doing when I open it is browsing the map
if I want navigation it easily switches to that mode I mean without even really that you haven't
to do anything it does that. Okay and I'm seeing next I see map orientation settings for the screen
orientation display language settings for use English names and maps a driving region which I have
set for United States the unit of measure so if you want to use the kilometers the metric system or
an English measure that's where you can set that an app theme and I'll stop there and let you
comment. Yep so map orientation you get three choices you get don't rotate meaning that north is
always at the top of the map you can set it to the direction of movement so that you're as you're
driving or as you're walking the map will rotate so that forward is at the top of the map the
direction you're moving or you can do to compass which north I'm sorry no north won't be up
I'm not even sure what that would do I don't think I don't have a compass in my device so I don't
know exactly how that would work I'm sorry yeah that's one to experiment with a bit yeah my
condition of a compass sorry yeah yeah I do I do north is up I don't I don't like when the map
rotates and shows me where forward is I can figure that out by my direction of movement the next
one down is screen orientation you could do you have three settings are you portrait landscape or
same as device and portrait obviously it's in portrait landscapes obviously landscape and same
as device means if you tip your phone sideways it's going to go into landscape and if you tip it
back upright it's going to go into portrait it's it's fine I leave it same as device
most of the time because I usually use it when I'm walking around but if I'm using it in a car
or something same as device doesn't work for me because if I set the I don't have a holder for my
phone if I set the phone down it could flip upside down on me or or some such thing and that's
always a little frustrating so I usually try to lock that back into place if I remember it
display language is pretty self-explanatory English names is self-explanatory driving range units
of measures that's those are all self-explanatory app theme I think there's just dark light and
light with a dark action bar you can play with that and see what you like the most
safe mode you can put it in I'm not sure I don't think I've ever enabled that I've never had a
problem with the way it operates but apparently if you have trouble with it you can try safe
mode and it runs slower but more stable and the next one is the storage directory and that's
where you can tell it where you want it to store your maps and like I said before I like to put
them on my my micro SD card just because there's much more room on that than there is built-in
yes and this is when you really do want to set up so that I got mine on the device storage
I had to go back in and rework that yeah and this is where um excuse me this is where
being a Linux user helps because if you you know it it says slash mouse less slash SD card or other
and if you hit other you can type in where you want it to go but it's not like a a folder
menu that you browse to and get it there you've got to type in the the directories with the
slashes so for Linux users that's going to be real natural and easy to do for a Windows user you
you might have to take a few minutes to figure that out because it's just not the way you're used
to doing stuff yeah that's a good point in the a lot of the features here and the way the software
set up is certainly has the flavor and feel of an open source project where people have worked on
and use other open source software so the the thing is the design is has just has that feel
yeah it definitely does it's a very organic design where features change as people notice them
as well or notice the lack of them um below storage directory there's used Kalman filter
I have no idea what that is uh I think that that's it may be and I could be wrong about this
I think that that's the correction that you use because a compass doesn't point
obviously because a globe is round not a flat piece of paper so as you as you take that round globe
and flatten it out and and represent it as a flat map the compass no longer
points to the top of that map so there's a correction there uh depending on where you are and how far
away from I think it's an international date line but it might be I don't know there's a correction
and I think that's what that is but I could be completely wrong about that and interesting that
there is a checkbox for this either turn it on or turn it off so it must have some definite changes
if you use or do not use it so I'm experimenting with it to figure that out how you like it might be
important yeah and then the last thing below that is um voice guidance output and that just
let you choose the channel that the voice guidance comes out on whether it's your your music or
media channel or your notification channel or your voice call audio and I think probably all that
that is going to matter is um the priority you know whether it's going to mute the audio that you're
already listening to to hear this or whether you're you know not going to hear it because you're on
the phone or whatever I think that's all that has to do with the navigation screen yes and this is
where your specific um options come in so when you hit navigation it's it gives you the little
pop-up that says profile specific settings and then it's got car, bike and walking now whichever one
of these you select all of the settings you do until you hit the back arrow are going to be
for that profile so you basically have to go through this three times you do once for the car
once for the bike and once for walking and and it'll that's how you set the different behavior modes
okay so I've selected the car um setting push the little car icon button and it has things in
here like um choosing online or offline navigation service osman goes for the choose for the fastest
route enable to calculate the fastest route or disable for the shortest route yep that's
the navigation service it gives you a couple of choices um osman is the only offline choice
the other ones are online it might be more accurate I'm not sure I haven't bothered trying to use
them um fastest route if you check that it's gonna it's gonna take you the the route from point
eight to point B in the shortest amount of time if you uncheck it it'll take you the shortest
amount of distance which could be a longer trip time wise that's all that is interesting you
really want to make sure that when you do routing with a GPS device that you kind of get an idea
of where you're going because there was a story here in southern Oregon where some people went from
the coast we were heading across to connect up with interstate five and there's a small mountain
range there they got off track by following the GPS device and it started snow started getting deep
and they finally got stuck and I think one of them died and the thing people they were looked and
looked and looked for them so um you do want to realize that when you use a GPS device you have to
use some common sense with it too is not perfect yeah and that's an extreme case I mean
do you hear minor cases all the time there was a a story in the papers um early uh last week
this week last week um the fella from odyssey was driving in massachusetts and following his GPS
and it told him to turn left and apparently he or right whatever it told him to turn and he missed
the specific turn and took the next one and he happened to turn on the railroad tracks and drove
down the railroad tracks uh until a train hit his car so I don't know how he didn't know he was on
railroad tracks it's gonna be the bumpiest road ever and fortunately for him he saw the training
got out of the car and he was not harmed but um yes I feel like I can have it all the time my wife's
brother popped in somebody else's car a family members car and went where he needed to go
and didn't how to get home and he just told the thing home take me home well it wasn't set for
the family's home it was set for somebody else's home and they drove a couple hours in the wrong
direction wow I was going to say and I'll probably cut this out but that wasn't Jonathan
they do with uh um railroad track thing wasn't no no it was him with the the push in the home button
no yeah I'm sure as far as the fastest route goes for myself when I'm in the car um with you know
time is is usually more valuable than distance so for the car mode I'll tell it fastest route
for walking and bicycling modes I want the shortest distance I don't want to have to go you know
walk an extra half mile just because my navigation device thinks it's faster I want the shortest
route next on the list is auto center map view and then time until the map view synchronizes with
the current position which is if I'm driving and that I I kind of want that to happen at a certain
instance so that I can see where I'm going and what's coming up yeah and that's a neat one when I
think about it because um so for the car I set that for 15 seconds for when I'm walking I don't
even know what I have it set for I don't really care but on a bicycle I want that real fast
because if I have to glance down on a bicycle I want to be able to just take a quick snapshot
and look back at where I'm going that's that's uh I think you want that shortest one on a bicycle I do
anyway yeah I agree with you there and then I typically try to stay off the roads as much as I can
with a bike and ride in the woods but um so I don't know that I'd need actual directions or
sometimes it's handy if you're trying to get on a trail that you don't know where you're at and
but yeah I'd say set that up find out what works for you and set that correctly there's lots and
lots of choices there yeah and the next one down you've got auto zoom map um and I think that's
going to depend more on the size of your device so my phone it's it's in like the three and a half
inch class of phones and I have it set to close up I get any further than that and um if I get into
a busy area uh visually busy where there's a lot of stuff displaying on the map um
anything anything further out than close up I can't make heads or tails of it and the auto zoom
feature it works according it says to your speed so as you slow down in that the zoom will be
enabled is that right yeah I believe it is I haven't paid super close attention to it while I'm
driving um mostly because I don't have a mount for my phone so I tend to use my Tom Tom device
that has the the windshield suction cup if I had a mount for my phone I'm pretty sure I would
almost completely stop using the Tom Tom and be able to answer your question and this is we're
talking about this I mean I'm looking at all these features that we haven't even went through all
of them yet and haven't talked about you know we've talked at all to percentage of them and when
you when you look at these features you realize just how much work is went into this navigation
program here and then to think that this is a free software program I'm just I just really get
feeling good about this and there are some people if they owned this would charge quite a bit for
it and tell you how important these features are oh my gosh and these features are just in the
menus wait until we get to the main screen where I mean you can you can customize that main screen
to display or not display or display only in a pull down when you select it so many different
things you can cover your screen and I'll be able to see them happen if you if you enable everything
but yeah there this like I said this is a feature full
piece of software and if this if there's not enough features for you here or not enough
menu options there's plugins there's like a dozen plugins at all yeah I know this is just
amazing to me I mean I haven't I use the OSM tracker the one there a little bit to try to
I'm do some stuff to contribute to open street map but when I found this I mean I'm just thrilled
with it and the next item here is show alarms and is for to configure traffic warning speed limits
four stops speed bumps speed camera warnings and lane information and this is really a big one I
mean if you know you're coming up on that speed camera maybe you want to go the other way or around
that stop light camera yep so yeah exactly and then if I'm hiking the last thing I want is some
alarm going hey there's a speed bump coming up or a speed camera I you know I want the thing to
be quiet so this is where you're kind of individualizing it for the for the use case that you're
going to have exactly and if you're hiking fast enough to have to worry about a speed bump well
you're pretty good yeah for real and then there's you know you can avoid things like toll roads
unpaid roads fairies motorways which is weird because why would you want to avoid a motorway
well if you're on foot a lot of times it's not legal to walk on them so you you might not have that
box checked under the car option but you would under the bicycle and hiking option or walking
option or you might have your bicycle bicycle settings set up as a motorcycle who knows most of
the rest of these are pretty self-explanatory except for the very bottom one precise routing which
is an alpha feature if you enable precise routing you will get better routing but it only works for
short distances and I forget what they said the distances are whether I thought the guy said it
was 200 kilometers but he might have said only 20 kilometers I really forget if you turn that off
you get less accurate routing but it's you know almost sure to work you might have to give it some
time to work but I so the work around for this I believe is to enable the precise routing but then
when you select your destination until it's a planet out you can there's a check box there for
selecting a possible non optimized route which I think is the work around for that and that's
the way I have mindset up is check box for precise routing and check box for possible non optimized
route for long distances okay so and that's an interesting feature and I was playing a little bit
with that and it was a little bit confusing for me so I'm glad you explained that I'd like to jump
back up here though after show alarms there is an announce configuration where you can have the
voice announce when you are violating the speed limit and whether is camera warnings and announce
street names and that which is really really handy oh yeah that's right so I'm going to hit the
back button we're going to show up in the plugin tab then correct yeah okay so the plugin tab
um this is where I had some stuff uh enabled that that David didn't so I think I think I did
um but there's some different plugins here um one of them the top one on my menu anyway is online maps
and you know the first thing why would you want online maps if this the whole advantage of this
thing is that it uses offline maps well because some of the online maps are satellite images so you
can get um being satellite image on there which makes it kind of feel more like Google maps if you
used to looking at stuff with trees and houses in the background um but also if you you know you're
navigating downtown in a city and you've got good cell connection the whole time why not use the
online maps are going to be up to the minute um so that's something that I enable online okay I
have that enabled also and as you check these things it's a little little small explanation of what
they're all about and it said um this is for show settings to configure a variety of online or
cash tile maps is base map or overlay underlay maps these maps can also be prepared offline and
copied to the osman folder so there's pretty much a lot of power yeah and I'm pretty sure that with
everything in the plugin menu selecting the box really only gives you more menu options it doesn't
you know change too much about the way the device operates until you find those menu options too
so most of them are pretty safe to check and then the next one is logging services and sleep mode
yep and this is what you said you were interested in um where you can you can track where you're
going and the device can go to sleep in your pocket and save battery life and save the you know
the power it's using from the screen and it will still track uh and record your trips and and
and look at where you're going um this one I do not have checked off because I use a different
piece of software for it but this you might be interested in david if I had this unchecked then with
that um keep osman from tracking me with a gpx file by downloading that to my device I believe
that is correct okay so going stealth this is the one you might want to keep unchecked yeah exactly
exactly uh the next one down is accessibility and it just shows settings for special accessibility
features I have not messed around with accessibility um I probably should have and Jonathan's probably
going to brow beat me for it when I see him at NELF but um I haven't messed with it I don't know
what those settings are yeah and a lot of times a sighted person the accessibility features um
kind of get in a way because they're not really they're kind of add more noise to your situation
so you might not want to have that checked if you don't have a limitation that you need accessibility
features for though sometimes it's really nice to enable accessibility features to see what's
going on with them and it can actually give you more information yeah that's true that's a good way
of putting it to that it can enable more noise so more often than not I disable accessibility
features on my systems um next one below that is the parking position plugin which I am not sure
that may be a separate download I think it used to be um do you have that on your menu no I believe
that is a separate download because mine doesn't have that in it and I saw that in the play store
that you can download that and I didn't download it so I'm not seeing it at all yeah it doesn't seem
to be that big of a deal it's basically you you stop driving you get out of your car and you're
going to go in the mall or someplace like that where there's a big park and lot and it basically
just lets you mark your spot and we'll guide you back to that spot um there's other built-in ways
of doing that so I don't think I've ever used it um maybe once just to see what it was about but you
can you can do it with a favorite as well it's just a favorite you'd want to delete when you're done
and and it's a bigger list to search through as opposed to here it is and there it is and now it's
gone which is I think how it works there are some that need this oh for sure there are definitely
people who are gonna benefit from a parking position like I mean how many times you see people walking
out of the mall you know at a good clip and as soon as the door shuts behind them they stop and
they look left and they looked right and they look lost I try to avoid them all but I've seen
that happen and no no of people they're going around pushing the um unlock button to try to hear
the horn go off on their car yes or the the trunk button it's trying to hope they find the car
that the trunk pops open and I've seen that too exactly so but um my goal is to stay away from the mall
and be in mind too but that's where you see that exactly okay so next is a distance calculator and
planning tool that one is kind of neat I don't understand it fully I'm afraid to mess with it too
much but if you enable it the the thing that I've been able to do with it it lets you measure
distance between two or more points on the map you you um you started off in a spa you touch
another spot and it tells you okay that's a hundred yards and you hit another spot and now it gives
you another like a running total as you tap spots throughout the map there's no undo on that if I recall
so you kind of have to get it right or or get it close and not be too picky about it but there's other
there's other features of that where it says you know that it's editing stuff so I don't know if
that attempts to log you into OSM and I've been a little afraid to do that so I haven't explored
that one too much I just used a distance um calculator on it occasionally though yes when I see a
feature like this I realize that there is it's probably got a pretty neat um use case and probably
more than one and you can probably dream up things on your own once you're used to it how to use it
so when I see something like this I realize that there is some geek has been involved in this or
how to how to need and put this in there I can think of one thing where you might use this measuring
is to be able if you say we're going to a piece of property and you knew that the survey stake was
say six or eight hundred feet from where you were at in a certain direction and you know about
where it was at you could you could measure that map thing or that using that measuring tool
might be able to help find that yeah for sure that would that would definitely work um as I said in
in the previous show that I did on this what I use it for is you know I'll find where I plan on
hunting if I plan and go into a specific you know a ground line or tree stand or a spot like that
I'll find that spot and then just measure to the nearest house and make sure that there's you
know a legal amount of distance between me and that house to shoot a gun or measure the thickness
of the woods you know so you get a feel for whether it's safer not you really a topographical
map is much better for judging safety but and being there of course but it's it's a way to use it
and it is a way that I do use it yeah around here I don't think people measure off road before
they fire their gun suits and hear them going off all the time okay next we have audio video notes
take a audio video note during the trip and I actually use this the other day as I fold into my
driveway I turned a video on and it took my phone and recorded a video of me driving down the
driveway toward the house and I don't know exactly where that goes but the pretty damn neat and it
puts a little tick on the map there that that note is there okay neat yeah I'm sure it only goes
to your the directory that you have everything stored to answer your SD card perhaps but
yeah that's kind of neat I haven't enabled that one so you're you're the expert on that one there
well I'm wondering if you could take this and put this up somehow and open street map to where
be valuable to somebody else or to yourself later on yeah I'm not sure with the with the other
tracking software that I use OSM tracker you can take audio notes you can take photographs
but I haven't seen a way to display them on open street maps so I'm not sure what their purpose is
that's if if anybody knows I you know more than happy to hear from you because I just don't know
what what the advantage of those are okay the next one is really a big one I think OSM editing show
settings needed for OSM feedback like collecting modifying OSM or open street maps points of interest
objects opening commenting OSM bugs and contributing recorded GPX files and it says requires OSM
credentials which I'm assuming is just making a count on open street map which is free of course
yeah and that's another one that kind of scares me I like to do my editing with a mouse in
you know the the editor that I'm familiar with or this may just upload traces I don't know I'm
again I'm a little afraid to to explore with that one and you know cause damage to the map that
someone would have to undo because I don't know how to undo edits from open street map yeah it would
be interesting to explore this a little bit more and get some information on it because you
can wreck contributions others it made that are worthwhile to open street map so that's really
important and but my experience is that you almost need to do work in the editor in order to get
things saved up there but it is easy to wreck something yeah and I have I have it's not super easy
to wreck something but you know start small work your way up don't try to edit waterways
that'll screw you up real bad something that's got you know 15 it's got more than the the maximum
allow number of points you don't go try and editing that or deleting that on your first go
that's a good point and I get a newbies list off open street map comes into a Yahoo email address
that I have and I noticed there was quite a bit of complaints on there about newbies getting
onto the map and creating a damage on it and making you know reversing other people's work and they
have to go back and fix it so if you are in rest in an open street map just keep that in mind that
it is a valuable resource people put time in on it and we want to do our best effort there yeah for
sure and the last one down the bottom is osman development so shows settings for development and
debugging features like root simulation or rendering performance display I do not have that one
checked but I am subscribed to the osman mailing list so I try to you know help out with with bugs
that way instead of doing the development right on the phone yeah good point and I hardly know what
debugging is pokey so you have to understand my skill level here so that might be something I
wouldn't need to learn some things about I'm assuming it's basically just like your frame rate or
maybe where in memory it's being stored it really could be anything developer wants to know I
believe but yeah I don't think it's it's nothing I mess with either so I you know I just leave that
one off okay online maps did we talk about that already no I don't think we did so that's if we
hit the back arrow and go back to the to the settings menu then the next one down is online maps
and there is a whole bunch of options in here things to check and to choose so I don't know if we
want to go through each one of those or just point out that this is there and for you know when
you you're interested in getting this program you understand this is going to be an option that's
available and there's lots of lots of choices here okay so the way that I treat this one and I'll
just run right through this real quick online and tile maps I do not check the box here because you
can do this from within the the viewing screen of the map itself if you set that up properly and this
will turn it on and leave it on and I don't think you can turn it back off or the one from the main
screen turns this on and off as you're using it I'm not sure but this one is not checked for me
tile map source I use that set to map Nick which is the open street map something to do with
displaying I'm not entirely certain but it is map Nick is open street map same same thing I do have
use internet checked so that it can download stuff minimum vector zoom level I don't know if the
lower number means more zoomed in or more zoomed out so I don't touch that one because just because
I don't know what it means let me see overlay map and underlay map at the moment I have none
selected so I'm not worried about that overlay transparency is zero so I'm not time to worry about
that and base map transparency from zero to 255 and mine is at 202 it could probably go up to I could
probably put it 205 and not not worry about it either so that's that for the online maps
okay the next category is logging services and sleep mode configure how to record trips and
enable sleep mode and that's something you have enabled and I do not that's when your plugins yeah
and so it has log track to gpx file was available and you can put a check mark in there has a
logging interval then there's a place in the middle for profile specific settings for this to pick
the car it's going to give you logging interval save current gpx track log track to gpx file
there's just a bunch of choices here online tracking you know there we go send tracking to a
specific web service or online tracking interval specified online the interval you want for online
tracking I saw a neat application of that several years ago at a lug meeting where a guy had a
small gps device constantly uploading its position to a server and he would take that in his plane
with him and fly across country and you could just always see where the guy's plane was at or his
motorcycle if he was adventuring on his motorcycles really cool is a neat application I don't think
I want my phone doing that no staying great probably is more of an interest to me than having
people know where I'm at but no bright light on me right on so the these same options seem to be
available for the bicycle also okay cool yeah and that's my last menu option under settings here
there's like there's an about which you know just gives you a about information same as any would be
so do you have any other menu options there well I'm seeing logging services in sleep mode then some
more about accessibility audio and video settings OSM editing do we already go through this and
OSM development well these are plugins that you have enabled that I don't have enabled so I
don't have the menu options for them yeah many times I'll just enable everything and then just
weave the nuisance items out later on is sometimes that causes problems and then sometimes it's nice
well it does I think it does with a thing like this because there's so many options sometimes you
can't find the nuisance item it it becomes a needle in a haystack yeah that's that's good it the
good and bad of having a program this full featured is that there is lots there but then also you
have a somewhat of a learning curve but I will say when you do get something learned it's really
worthwhile and you can become a or get really good power use out of it oh yeah I can agree with
that 100 percent especially something like this that's just got the menu after menu of features in
okay then are we gonna jump back then to the main screen the four big tiles on it yeah yeah why
don't we do that and from the main screen just hit map let's get into the map time to look at that I
think okay so I've hit map and of course I live in Oregon so I have the Oregon map showing up
yeah now here is where it's gonna look different depending on what you're doing with the thing
there's several different ways it's gonna look different the first one is that in the bottom left-hand
corner uh whatever your default setting that should be what came up so mine there's a little picture
of a globe and meaning that I'm in the map browsing mode for this it's not gonna be in the uh
but you can change it by hitting that picture you can change it to the car mode bicycle pedestrian
mode um right below is a little gray button that's a menu button that's not to change the mode that
it's in so there's actually two buttons there right and just to the right of that my map is showing
a scale it's minus that now at 200 feet and then a zoom in and zoom out or it's actually zoom out
and zoom in the magnifying glass of the plus and minus in it yep I've got that as well uh next on
the top bar um mine's got a transparent bar with some buttons on it on my phone they're really small
buttons but one that you want to hit now that I would suggest we all go through now is the one
that looks like a gear and that's the settings for your screen here right and once you hit that
you get a I mean it looks like a Chinese food menu here there are so many options yeah really
and there's four tabs you've got tab for map browsing car bicycle and pedestrian and you can set
each of these um to be what you want so I can run through these pretty quickly uh the first one
is compass okay so the first thing is all these you'll notice have check boxes um if there is no
check in the box obviously that item is not displayed if there is a check in the box it will be
displayed and for some of them there's a third function what does it look like uh there'll be
a check in the box but in the description there'll be hyphens before and after the the word
and what that means is that it's in a hideable pull down menu so keep that in mind that some of
the things you might want sometimes you might not always want um you can pull down and inspect those
and then uh like so for instance when I'm driving I try to use as few of these things as possible
but sometimes when I'm driving I want to know my altitude so I have that in the pull down menu
or I want maybe to know um the parking plug-in you can put that in a pull down menu uh those are
just some of the things that you can do there so for mine uh the first section here is status bar
there's the compass if you put the compass up there you can tap the compass and change the
mode so that it's either north is up or it's tracking compass direction or it's tracking your movement
direction uh the next one is the logging services button kind of opens and on the fly menu for those
things uh I have that disabled so I can't really go into much more detail there's a uh lock screen
button so that you're not accidentally hitting the thing and changing stuff uh you can enable street
names or oh I'm sorry the street name that you're on will show up in that top menu bar map layers
is how you adjust the um the online data your your base map here is going to be in the center layer
and you can do an underlay and an overlay uh I don't know why you would do both I don't know why
both exist I think either or works just fine for me but uh then again this is as powerful a power
user as I can be at this point somebody else is going to be better um there's the gear for the
configure screen which I like to have there so I can get at it there is a where am I button which
anytime you hit that it will center the map on your location uh that's the status bar on the top
panel there's a right hand panel which has got um a waypoint flag uh tells you the distance to
your next waypoint um probably notes on a turn but do distance to your next waypoint destination
is distance maybe time I forget which in the waypoint to distance or time um to your destination
it's got the parking plug-in access to that time to go to your final destination um is another one
your current speed you can enable disable or hide that um so for instance you probably want that
in a car but probably don't care about it for any of the other features except for maybe bicycle
GPS info will tell you like how many satellites you're you're picking up on um speed limit can be
really handy if you want to know the speed limit where you're at and if someone has put that into
open street map for you or if you're able to put that in yourself that one can be um tremendously
helpful you can get an altitude um reading you can get the distance measurement which is the plug
and I was talking about um I keep that in a pull down for all of these and I can just measure
distance between two points on the map as opposed to having to guesstimate them there's a left hand
panel that tells you your next turn um a smaller version of your next turn and your second next turn
which means the one after your next turn there are miscellaneous things um map style
uh is not a checkbox you you change the style of the map there day night map
I believe that's just yep you tell it whether you want day or night or they want it to um
be linked to your light sensor or to the sunrise sunset times uh the ruler is the um scale of the
map on the bottom I believe destination direction that's a tricky one if you enable that that one
confused me for a little bit it just points at your destination no matter how far off the map
it is if you have that enabled um that might throw you off a bit you know what the heck is that extra
little blue thing it's like ghosted on there um I really I really like that because I can tell
I can mine shows up as a red triangle if I'm we're talking about the same thing probably our time
I'm in a location like from when I drive from work it's an hour to my home and it's unbelievable
where you think mentally where your house is at and for your it really points to you and I think
that's really nice for getting a visual of how your area is really laid out and what you know
what your location is because I get turned around because of the way the roads run they don't
always run east west north and south yeah yeah why is this thing pointing over my right shoulder
I'm trying to go home I have the same thing happen when sometimes I'll see the moon and might the
road I go on it it changes direction and all of a sudden the moon will look like it's in a wrong
spot so it's kind of a wake up call and it maybe just shows that I don't have a very good sense of
direction yeah maybe um yeah I mean as you're driving it's it gets tougher too because there's so
many small turns in the road that you wouldn't even register as turns yeah right okay so there was
uh we doing uh destination direction transparent skin um I think that just means the menu bars there
not the actual layers of the map and then there's rendering attributes of the map you can show contour
lines at different zoom levels there's a rendering mode what is rendering mode and optimize for
browse car bicycle or pedestrian I'm not I'm not even sure what the difference what would change
there it always seems to be fairly optimized um you can hide polygons which means you hide like
buildings they would not display on there or uh perhaps even lakes or swimming pools might not
display I'm not entirely certain there hide boundaries would hide the um like the town lines
and a road's only map is a kind of minimized version of um of open street map that's just the road
so that it's it's less confusing which is probably pretty helpful in a smaller device but because
I spend so much time editing the map um I like to see what is there and what isn't so I leave
roads only turned off yeah and like always you know when there's an option there's use case for that
so I'm try it out and see how it goes because it might be something you really like yeah and when
you get through that list and setting it up the way you like it there's another tab for your car
you can do it all again another one for bicycle another one for walk and so it'll it'll actually
even display in different ways depending on what you're doing with it yeah the the just the
sheer volume of the um settings you can put in here just it makes this a little intimidating maybe
but it also makes it quite useful and once you have it set up it's um it really isn't intriguing
application yeah I I really like it a lot so once you get all that done um maybe the next
thing to do oh and uh real quick because this one confused me for a while I have the layers button
up on there and if you hit the layers it's gonna pull up yet another menu um and it's going to
ask you several different things it'll um it'll let you show points of interest on the map
points of interest labels on the map it'll let you show your favorites on the map
which if I'm driving I don't want to see my favorites I have too many of them I go and pass them
all the time points of interest I may or may not want to see those are um not specifically points
of interest like oh there's a monument to head they can be anything like there's a pharmacy
over there or there's a mailbox or a bathroom a public restroom they can be just about anything so
they may be too overwhelming as well uh the map source lets you choose your base map so offline
vector map is a good choice for that but if you scroll way down you can select an overlay or
an underlay map and say you select the overlay map now it gives you sources for that if you select
Microsoft Earth you're going to get a slider at the bottom of your screen for the transparency of
Microsoft Earth so you can kind of morph your map how you like it to where you see the roads
um and the satellite image over that that's how you get that done okay and
slows things down on my phone right and that's that can be bad now I'm trying to get back to where
we were uh we can be anywhere you want now because that that I just kind of finished up the menus
um I think a good thing to do at this point is to locate your house on the map and create a favorite
for your home and and start creating a couple of favorites and learning how that works so you're
suggesting that I'm at home now so let's find myself and create a favorite out of that yeah if
you're home that's a good way to do it you can just hit the the locate me button or you can
browse around the map until you find your home and you know find where it should or would be
on the map um and all you have to do is when you find the spot you want to make a favorite out of
you just um long press on that until you get a little uh looks like a speech bubble almost and
it'll say location latitude longitude and have a close button on it and if you hit the close button
it disappears and you get to do it again but if not you can hit the center of that bubble
and it'll pull up yet another menu you can get directions to set its destination
directions from search near here share location add to favorites or mark as a parking position now
I was talking about adding it to favorites so if we hit that it lets you give a name to that spot
and it lets you categorize your favorites so you know I have categories such as um friends and
family and shopping places and hiking trails and all kinds of stuff like that and you can uh
you just type in what you want and hit add and it'll it'll add it there yeah and so planning
your categories kind of an important step but it's pretty easy to make new categories and change
them and there's even a replace button here for if you want to change what category the favorite is in
yep and so if you wanted to do some actual navigation with the thing uh that's the way I like to
do it is to to find where I want to go on the map add a favorite to that spot because if I'm going
somewhere there's a good chance I'm going to go there again um and from the map you can hit the uh
the menu button or you can back out one screen to that greeting screen and go to the favorites tab
and locate what you're looking for in there um you find the spot you're looking for tap on it
and you get uh on yet another menu a little pop-up dialog um you can get directions to that spot
set it as a destination uh show it on the map edit the favorite or delete the favorite
and the difference between setting something as a destination and getting directions
is directions as actual navigation setting as destination just kind of puts a flag on it
for the time being you can start your navigation at a later time you can also stop your navigation
and it's not going to delete that um destination you've got to do that manually
okay so I guess we're having created a favorite and understanding how to put points
actually or wait I guess I'd call these wait points in the map in places you want to go a return to
yep it's very very easy to do and in fact it's uh this is quite a bit easier to use and say
some handheld GPS devices where it might take you quite a bit of time to do this since you have a
software keyboard available oh man it takes so long to put favorites into my tom tom it's ridiculous
it it it doesn't like half of the buttons you press and it doesn't cooperate and you can only
put in like street numbers which never line up where you want this this is so much better
yeah there there is probably some someone from Finland or somewhere that's really fast at doing
that and it's probably scoffing at you but we'll have to certainly find these things a lot of times
to be just real heavy time consumers so I'm happy to see that osman really has a really efficient
way to put favorites in oh yeah for sure and every once in a while you got to go somewhere you don't
know where it is and they have a if you go back to the the main menu there not in the main menu but
the like the welcome screen sort of there's a search function and that lets you do several
different kinds of searches I like the one that's got a little house icon is an address search so you
put in your your region which in the United States is the state you're in your city your street
and nine out of ten times unless you're editing open street map and putting street numbers in
you're going to go you're going to have two streets which is means it's going to direct you to a
crossroad not a not a house number right and then of course open street map where there is a lot
of data in open street map that was taken from data from the US I mean they're based it's basically
open and they they took it in there isn't a lot of address specific information that was
it's actually been downloaded in the open street map and that that big download I guess I guess
I'd call it the big download when they the US government allowed them to download that information
yeah when they imported the I think they call them the tiger maps but they were the US
geological survey map from at a whatever point they took it in it yeah you can say it so much
better than I can I just know it happened and it's yeah good enough yep and then there's also
in the search menu let me see you can do an address search you can do you can put in specific
coordinates it'll find that point you can search your favorites which I don't know why you wouldn't
just look for them in the menu there's a search history there's a transportation search I'm not
sure how that works probably finds buses and trains for you that's that information is not always
completely up to date for the more rural places the the city centers I bet it's pretty accurate
for but I don't live in one so I can't speak to it and there's also a point of interest search
where you can browse through or search for specific stuff like fuel or public parking or public
transport as food shops emergency entertains all kinds of of point of interest type stuff in here
again this is just I mean if you haven't seen this it's worth just looking at to see all the
features that are here and all the options that are available to search for I use the search by name
today to do a little test run when I went down to see my wife of the hospital and I put in the hospital
name and I'm sure enough I could even go to the helipad there where the emergency helicopter comes in
it was in the map I love adding helipads and that might make me a nerd but I'm comfortable with
that good enough yes okay so where do we want to go from here if we go back back to the main menu
I think we've pretty well covered just about everything that's here I think we have to I mean
except for maybe specific use cases but I've kind of been talking about mine the whole time
yeah and since I'm sort of a new user I don't have a lot of specific use cases except what I
talked about and I'm really planning on using this I can just see that I'm going to this is
going to be my friend for navigation here this application because it's just so full feature
and I really love the fact that it's open source and free and that you can contribute to it it's
a avenue to be able to give back to the community and actually make your life and other people's
lives better oh it definitely is one one feature that I like about this it's just kind of built in
which you wouldn't you might not even notice you might not even pick up that it does it but
if you are know if you're just panning around the map and browsing the map if you've got no
destination set and no navigation going on and you back out to like the main screen it'll minimize
for a little while and then eventually shut itself down so that you can do the main screen of
your Android system I mean so that you can do you know email or whatever else you got on your your
phone or device if there's navigation going on it minimizes itself to like the system tray
and just keeps running and running and running and in your notification area you'll see you know
the little the circle like little target reticle with the dot and it you know for GPS tap that
and it pops you right back open to know where your position on on the map isn't and you're navigating
and I think it even you know keeps broadcasting on the sound channels too so you can be doing other
things and still get your turn-by-turn directions from it it's that's it was just one little feature
that I kind of liked yeah and this I can't stress enough to people that are listening that might
be thinking about taking you know downloading this and using it just how nice I think this looks
and I know I don't have a actually I don't like sometimes a lot of flashy stuff that where
it's real stylish but I like something that's really really functional and really gets down to
the basics yet has a lot of options and this really just fits for me and I just can't tell you how
much how pleased I am to have found this and actually the reason why I even dug around and started
looking for this is because I heard you talking on hacker public radio about this the paper map
thing with someone else and I thought I've got to check that out and then I got a whole of you
and thought you know we could get together and talk about it and you know as usual I'm kind of
like the pilot fish hooked onto the shark and feeding off the crumbs you know and so that's I mean
you certainly know a lot about this and I don't know how many years you've used it but seem to have
good knowledge of it so I say you're the expert maybe in this topic but a lot of times I'm the same
with the pilot fish thing and I know what you mean about this looking good it's not it's not a
flashy thing but to have the map displayed on your crisp phone screen as compared to you know the
chunky blocky resistive touch screens that come with car navigation it really is like a step up in
like quality it just it looks and feels much more quality than you know those devices that
is suction cup to your windshield and I think a real advantage when you do have a smart phone
to be able to get this type of a package or application in there it's really wonderful and then
of course being free and being developed by others you just look at this and look at the depth of
it and understand for me what this would sell for if someone was actually trying to market this
and sell this how they would market all the options that it has and the detail that it has
and it's a wonderful application and I just hope other people will download it and use it and
contribute to the project and I plan on contributing to get the entire you know worldwide maps and
limited downloads of that and I'm telling you it's a bargain if you can send them just the price
for it and let me let me step back to and tell you something else that it can do for you that
nothing else can do is as I'm panning around the map here and we're discussing this and I'm looking
at it most people if you're following along at home and doing this you're going to see some combination
of like white roads and yellow roads and that kind of thing I'm an open street map editor I
spend time improving the map in my area where where I see things and and know things and can
research things or drive by and have a look at it so as I'm panning around I'm not looking at yellow
and white lines I'm looking at a highly detailed map with buildings and fields and railroad tracks
and forests parking lots you know many storages all the like the thing golf courses and these are
all things that I've added to the map and it's so extraordinarily satisfying to know that my
contributions actually count you can you know like with a Tom Tom you can change those speed limits
in the roads all you want and and pretend you're uploading them and pretend that somebody is looking
and caring and they pretty much just go nowhere it's like the old days of windows xp when you click
the buttons or report a problem and hope that you're you know hey they're going to fix that problem
because I reported it it's never going to happen this thing has a very real very tangible
feedback loop with your contributions to an open source project to the open street map and I
can't begin to tell you how gratifying that is when I look at this map and see hey I did that I did
that you know it's just really heartwarming yeah you cannot at least for me I don't know that some
people understand the value of being able to participate in editing a map and contributing
these things because it just makes so much sense that you can someone is built a platform that you
can easily use you can contribute other people can get value out of it and you actually can get
your own value like you're talking about putting your points of interest in your destinations and that
so I really applaud the open street map and the developers of osman for what they've done and I believe
that people should support the project and since I don't buy much software they're here little in fact
I try to take at least part of that money and send it to open source projects because they're
actually doing something good for other people and it's all all of us making the world a better place
I couldn't say that any better if I tried well pokey thank you for coming on with me tonight I
know we've got an hour and 37 right now into this it might be a little shorter let's get done
editing in ooh a short one hour and 37 right yeah well thank you so much for inviting me on it was
a really great idea that you had I was really excited when you came up with it sounded like fun
and indeed it was so thanks a bunch and thanks everyone for listening yeah and I'll see you
around the block and catch you around on Hacker Public Radio and I'd like to remind those people
that are listening that Hacker Public Radio is a community podcast network you can contribute
your own augcast podcast whatever you want to call up to Hacker Public Radio just by going to
the Hacker Public Radio.org website and getting the contribute information and we'd love to have
you contribute yeah for sure and an an easy way to remember that is you oh can a show
exactly I've got the mug to prove that catch you later pokey all right take it easy
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