Slashdot Mirror
Smooth Open Street Maps For the iPhone
detrow writes "A number of projects are working on bringing a smooth Open Street Maps Viewer to the iPhone, where smooth means as smooth as the Google Maps application. Route-Me is one of them (New BSD License, complete Objective-C native code). The GPS Mission blog reports that their application (GPS Mission) uses Route-Me and made it to the App Store as the first application using that OSM component. The map looks real nice and behaves just like Google Maps with all the well known zooming and panning available. What other iPhone applications exist that feel as smooth as Google Maps but use the Open Street Map?"
This was an idea that I appreciated when I was testing out a TomTom - the ability to submit and fetch community-based feedback about road closures, detours, etc. For a variety of reasons I ended up choosing a Garmin for my nav needs, but I do wish they would implement some of the community based features.
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
I think you are referring to the Dash GPS. I haven't used one myself, but it at least looks interesting.
Enemy of the Sun
I don't know whether it runs on the IPhone. But Marble is an awesome application that allows smooth zooming and panning. And it's free software (LGPL):
http://edu.kde.org/marble
Marble comes with lots of nice features (even with a somewhat hidden GPS support):
http://edu.kde.org/marble/current.php
It's available for a lot of different plattforms (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X) and the source code
just depends on Qt as a single dependency.
http://edu.kde.org/marble/download.php
I worked with the Microsoft Virtual Earth team a few months back to bring their Virtual Earth platform to the iPhone/Mac in native OpenGL and Objective C. I released my work under the BSD license. http://consonancesw.com/developers/virtualearthkit/ The map view is still closed source, as it was done for a client who wanted it to remain closed source for a bit to give his app an advantage, but it should be released soon. The app has been in the app store for a while, it's called NMobile. It's featured an OpenGL map view with full gesture support. The framework I open sourced also does a lot of nifty stuff like geocoding, reverse geocoding, static maps, and I'm adding supporting for finding locations like nearby restaurants and so forth. The route-me folks should keep in mind that their framework looks to implement support for talking to Virtual Earth without authenticating, which is in complete violation of the Virtual Earth terms. Using the Virtual Earth tiles requires sending a SOAP request for a transaction token, and then attaching that transaction token to every request. Their code does not seem to be doing that. Microsoft has warned that people who try to grab their tiles for free will likely be cut off. The route-me folks are welcome to borrow some code from my project (BSD licensed) to bring themselves within spec. At least Microsoft's terms are better than Google's, who doesn't seem to even allow that sort of behavior at all...
My GWT maps are just as smooth as Google Maps, and the library supports the WMS tiling protocol, which I'm guessing is what OpenStreeMap uses. I'll have to investigate and talk to the OpenStreetMap guys to maybe use my client.
http://www.navit-project.org/ and http://wiki.navit-project.org/index.php/Main_Page are the urls to Navit, a car navigation system with routing engine. Of course it also works when on foot, it can use open street maps and runs on various devices (my own being a PC and an HP Ipaq H2210). It is still in development but is usable.
Then start walking/driving around with a GPS and map your city. OSM is the map that anyone can edit.