GNOME Has Big Plans For Its Maps Application

[droidhacker]

What is their objective?
I.e., why would I use their "application", which is just a bunch of javascript that shows a webpage in its own fake-application window, instead of just going to openstreetmap in a browser?

Also, its useless without being also available on mobile (read as: Android).

[schmidtbag]

About offline routing in modRana - it is supported and uses the Monav routing daemon to do the actual routing. There is also a Monav routing data repository with global coverage (~130 GB of data in all packs together) - and you can build your own, as the software used to generate it is also open source.

Unfortunately the Monav integration is still quite a mess as the Monav upstream is pretty much dead and modRana is using a fork with some non-upstream patches and includes a prebuilt-binary that might not even work on some platforms... And the Monav issue will be only getting worse as the Monav routing daemon needs Qt 4 and already can't be used on some Qt 5 only platforms (Sailfish OS). I've talked to the Marble developers (Monav is one of the supported offline routing backends used by Marble) and they might port it to Qt 5, but have no timeframe for it yet

I wouldn't say modrana itself is obscure, but more the fact that it doesn't seem to have a specific agenda, it is missing in many distro repos, and you kind of have to go out of your way to find it. I didn't mean to say obscure in a critical way.

Offline routing was the one and only thing modrana failed to do for me. Its been a couple months since I tried using it but I know the issue had something to do with it being unable to read the routing data. I remember having issues downloading routing data packs as well as getting modrana to load them. This was all on Arch linux 64 bit. If offline routing worked, I'd gladly have modrana set up on one of my systems right now because it overall seemed to work nicely.

I'm willing to try it out again, though. I'd like to contribute, as (IIRC) it is python based and I know the language pretty well. But, I'm not very good at continuing existing projects, and I'm not fluent in how the system works on the back end.

[Awesomeness]

That's weird, I never heard of this. I've done a solid hour or two of research for linux turn-by-turn GPS navigation and this never came up. I encountered obscure incomplete projects like modrana, but not this. Thanks for the info though, this could really come in handy.

Marble routing settings say something about one of the possible routing providers to be a thing called Gosmore that's used offline. I didn't look into it because I don't use my PC. The maps themselves can be cached offline via the "Download Region" command.
Marble has a Qt-only version as well, in case you don't want KDE libraries.

[IsacDaavid]

What is their objective?

A consistent user experience that fits most use cases with Gnome-ish software by default.

I.e., why would I use their "application", which is just a bunch of javascript that shows a webpage in its own fake-application window, instead of just going to openstreetmap in a browser?

Also, its useless without being also available on mobile (read as: Android).

Why would you think you need a mobile application that shows a webpage in its own fake-application window, instead of just going to openstreetmap in a browser for mobile OS?

[blackiwid]

so this "this programm can do this already why write a new one", and emacs is at least a very great ide + operation system, why did they develop vi then?

Because its written in another language and more important written with a nice looking toolkit, that fitts into the gnome desktop. And the feature-set and the ui will not be exactly the same.

you could also then say hey kedit or whatever the name is of the editor is also a nice editor why developing gedit, just they have time fun on it and some kind of vision of making it better and if its only the other ui-toolkit.

And then the comparsion of "google maps" is then even more absurd. its a extremly slow browser gui. I hate browser because its such a slow resource hock where u basicly need a Quadcore cpu to have it somewhat lagfree but even than with anough open tabs it still starts to lag.

Its like starting Farcry to write your emails in it.

So yes fast native programms are better. And even if you are happy with webbrowser as operation system like google wants it. Google tracks your data input, so they can track your movement and your plans of movement completly.

And here in germany some places have even better openstreetmap coverage than google maps data.

[hourwatch]

If you want to help out with GeoClue's geolocation you can run Mozilla's MozStumbler https://wiki.mozilla.org/CloudServic...n#Contributing

I didn't know about it. I'm gonna install it. Thanks for share!!