RogerBW's Blog

Osmand+ 19 May 2018

I've replaced the fairly basic Maps program I was using on my shinyphone with Osmand+.

It's shown as Osmand~ on the phone, presumably thanks to Significant Metacharacters. It works fairly well for navigation as well as for simply looking at maps, though it's not going to replace my Garmin navi any time soon (screen size alone would be a concern while driving); it's a bit more viable for navigation on foot. Route-finding is by internal calculation, or can call out to external services such as OSRM.

Sectional maps can be downloaded with a fair bit of choice in coverage: for example "all of the UK", "all of England", or "South-East England", in standard and roads-only versions. (Contour lines are also available, for bicycle route plotting.) All of England is just under a gigabyte; I expect to be able to take all relevant regions when I next travel on the Continent.

(And it can display in something like OpenStreetMap's Mapnik style.)

The Contacts app on LineageOS does not recognise or import the GEO (latitude/longitude) property of a vCard, so the locations values I already have for many of my friends' places aren't available here. That seems sloppy, but isn't this program's fault.

Postcode lookup is distinctly poor (missing for example E13 9JE, where I used to live) – which is odd, because the current OpenStreetMap data (off which this is running) definitely include all of the Codepoint Open public data set.

However, I had already written a GPX exporter for my Garmin navi, so I can easily pull address or other coordinate data from my master lists into a useful form. The required xmlns:xsi and xsi:schemaLocation tags for this software are different, though. (I'd have thought an XML parser ought to be able to ignore such things, but apparently not.) With a little light coding, my existing exporter can now produce GPX files that Osmand+ can import. My cargo-culted header, for anyone else having trouble:

<gpx
xmlns="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
version="1.1"
creator="Osmand+"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1 http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1/gpx.xsd">

Of course, clicking to download doesn't work; the built-in browser sniffs the content-type and assumes it's some sort of XML that it ought to parse and display. No, of course there's no "download this link" option. Yes, I'm looking into alternative browsers. But I have termux, so I can download with wget or scp.

Importing a GPX file puts all its content in a new category with Osmand+, with the filename as the (editable) category name. Since I tend to load just the locations I need for a particular event, rather than everywhere I know about, this is fairly convenient.

Overall, it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. Thanks to Ian Jackson for the recommendation.

Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.

Search
Archive
Tags 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 3d printing action advent of code aeronautics aikakirja anecdote animation anime army astronomy audio audio tech aviation base commerce battletech beer boardgaming book of the week bookmonth chain of command children chris chronicle church of no redeeming virtues cold war comedy computing contemporary cornish smuggler cosmic encounter coup covid-19 crime cthulhu eternal cycling dead of winter doctor who documentary drama driving drone ecchi economics en garde espionage essen 2015 essen 2016 essen 2017 essen 2018 essen 2019 essen 2022 essen 2023 existential risk falklands war fandom fanfic fantasy feminism film firefly first world war flash point flight simulation food garmin drive gazebo genesys geocaching geodata gin gkp gurps gurps 101 gus harpoon historical history horror hugo 2014 hugo 2015 hugo 2016 hugo 2017 hugo 2018 hugo 2019 hugo 2020 hugo 2022 hugo-nebula reread in brief avoid instrumented life javascript julian simpson julie enfield kickstarter kotlin learn to play leaving earth linux liquor lovecraftiana lua mecha men with beards mpd museum music mystery naval noir non-fiction one for the brow opera parody paul temple perl perl weekly challenge photography podcast politics postscript powers prediction privacy project woolsack pyracantha python quantum rail raku ranting raspberry pi reading reading boardgames social real life restaurant reviews romance rpg a day rpgs ruby rust scala science fiction scythe second world war security shipwreck simutrans smartphone south atlantic war squaddies stationery steampunk stuarts suburbia superheroes suspense television the resistance the weekly challenge thirsty meeples thriller tin soldier torg toys trailers travel type 26 type 31 type 45 vietnam war war wargaming weather wives and sweethearts writing about writing x-wing young adult
Special All book reviews, All film reviews
Produced by aikakirja v0.1