Notices

I have installed everything from Blaizzen's latest "Release.zip" and followed his instructions carefully.
It seems to work, I have to test it on a real trip tomorrow. At least I heard a first announcement of espeak... Splendid!
Also, the speech server seems to be using almost no CPU when running idle, which is nice.

One thing was odd:
The POI button toggles POI displaying. But: after changing to "All" in settings, it took about 10 minutes until "all" categories of POI appeared (instead of just the preselected subset).
While this long time, the Maps app was fully responsive. Bug or feature?

Thanks for this megacool hack.

Actually the evalspeech.js file is now the hardcoded array for the speech. I should have used a different name to reduce confusion, but I was lazy at the time


As for turning off R2D2 from saying your streetnames
Change getSound(navTrans, true); from true to false

I'm suprised this thread hasn't exploded, this is unbelievably cool! I can't believe it took a Pharmacist with an "interest" in programming to implement voice guidance in to Ovi Maps in a few weeks....how long has Nokia had, about 18 months?

Congrats and thanks again to Blaizzen and CormacB, you guys rock. I'll try Blaizzen's version when I get back from holidays in a few days time...

I wounder if ovi maps will ever become a good alternative to sygic

I wonder whether modrana will ever become a good alternative to ovi maps, sygic and navit taken together.

Seriously, sygic and ovi maps are closed-source, and navit cannot show satellite tiles.

Though, I think that HTML/XML/XUL are better than Python.

And for me the main feature is being able to use it off-line with limited battery.

I would be glad to have accelerometer/gyroscope/compass combination precise enough to replace GPS when its signal cannot be received (Underground?).

For now, Modrana is my favourite, and Sygic is the antipode.

Agree. For these cellular providers, even infinitely large credit would hardly be enough.

An idea: put a barcode scanner on a lamppost; when it reads appropriate barcode, it activates WiFi router for several minutes for the person who gave the barcode to get anything it wanted.
Potentially, the camera could track barcode movement and rotate WiFi router's antenna correspondingly. It would make WiFi harder to intercept, power-saving, and the whole system could get electricity from a solar panel and use the same camera which is already used for other purpose (like, traffic camera; and then passengers could have Internet on the road).

Who will pay for WiFi (free WiFi is quite rare)? Well, if you already have Internet from XYZ at home, then make barcode from text "XYZ", and cameras which have XYZ's WiFi routers will then connect with your device and log into XYZ's service. You would use the same Internet provider as at home, you wouldn't need to worry about slow-and-expensive cellular data plan, and, as special benefit for XYZ, its routers would not need to work all-the-day: they would be activated only when camera reads the barcode, the electricity would be from solar panel, the solar panels would be connected into a grid, and XYZ could claim itself to be "green". The electric radiation pollution wouldn't be too high (compare pointed beam with omnidirectional waves), the interference would be reduced, etc.

I rarely have credit on my phone so offline navigation is a must for me

Sorry for not browsing through the whole thread, but where can I download the voice files?

Here you/they are:

so by this mean I can use my native language as defalult voice navigation, if I use indonesia_male I take it from my n86 or n95 instead being concern if its not working. so I just place it under cities folder or I should run command like Blaizzen posted before. sorry still dunno noob here.
thanx in advance.

Is there a config.xml along with the sound files? You could also get the indonesian voice files from http://symbian.clanteam.com/indexmaps.htm or http://www.hpsblog.com/2009/07/direc...0-without.html

Step by step instructions for Indonesian:

I am assuming the indonesian voice files are zipped in a file called indonesian.zip from the linked site and all files are saved to MyDocs. Otherwise you might need need to change some paths.

• Download index.html.gz from here http://talk.maemo.org/attachment.php...3&d=1295624977
• Copy your voice files to your N900
• Open X terminal and become root
• Run
  
  Code:

  cd /usr/share/nokia-maps/html
  mv index.html index.html.backup
  cp /home/user/MyDocs/index.html.gz .
  gunzip index.html.gz
  cp /home/user/MyDocs/indonesian.zip .
  unzip indonesian.zip
  rm indonesian.zip
  cd indonesian/ind-bahasa_male
  for f in *; do mv $f $f.wav; done

• You now should have config.xml in /usr/share/nokia-maps/html/indonesian and a bunch of wav files in /usr/share/nokia-maps/html/indonesian/ind-bahasa_male
• Startup maps and create a route. It should automatically use the selected "id-ID" locale to pick the right sound folder.

Edit: the attached updated index.html will show an error message if it can't load the voice config. It also is possible to change the language used by renaming the folders or changing the _codeToFolder mapping in index.html

I also don't know if it is possible/how to change the language for maps so that I can test this myself