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Whyis RoadNav not popular?

I've been playing around with different GPS options lately to see if I could come up with a suitable setup. I've gone back to trying RoadNav and after using it for my last trip from Las Vegas to San Francisco I have to say I'm actually very happy with it. It made the whole trip without crashing and I was able to fit all of Nevada and California maps into about 200mbs of space so I didn't have to worry when I went off route a few times. After using it for the past two weeks I hardly ever pull up Maemo Mapper anymore (which is a very good program in it's own respects but no vector maps).

There are a few quirks with RoadNav that can detract from it. For one, the route download feature doesn't appear to work (I get around this by downloading the route in Maemo Mapper and loading it in RoadNav). Also, the route itself doesn't show up very well as its only shown as a single pixel line and can be hard to see. Finally, it isn't possible to zoom out to a state level as it will crash when it tries to draw the whole state.

These issues though seem pretty minor and it looks like there is still a lot of active development on the upstream version of RoadNav. From what I can tell the current port for the tablets hasn't been updated in a couple of months and I'm wondering if the guy who did the initial port has lost interest.

Anyway, does anyone else use RoadNav primarily and Maemo Mapper as a backup? If so what are your thoughts on it? Is there any chance of seeing any more updated ports for the tablets?

Re: Whyis RoadNav not popular?

Sorry, I meant RoadMap in all of the above text... for some reason I am unable to edit my post though...

Re: Whyis RoadNav not popular?

Quote:

Originally Posted by You

Why is RoadNav (RoadMap) not popular?
...
There are a few quirks with RoadNav that can detract from it. For one, the route download feature doesn't appear to work (I get around this by downloading the route in Maemo Mapper and loading it in RoadNav). Also, the route itself doesn't show up very well as its only shown as a single pixel line and can be hard to see. Finally, it isn't possible to zoom out to a state level as it will crash when it tries to draw the whole state....

Well, there^ ya go.
MaemoMapper does not have these issues.

Re: Whyis RoadNav not popular?

From the front page of the sourceforge site:

Quote:

Most of the map files used by RoadMap are generated from the TIGER files provided by the US Census Bureau, and from the RNF files provided by Statistics Canada, and thus cover northern North America only. There has been recent work on deriving RoadMap data from other sources, including postgis and other shapefile-based formats, but this work is either not on the main development branch, or very experimental.

I live in the UK, no interest in/availability of tiger maps. I do note that there's been some recent work to be able to use OSM data, but afaik RoadMap doesn't support routing, so I'd prefer to do dev work on something like Navit which uses OSM data for mapping and routing. Perhaps if a version which supports OSM were released there'd be more interest.

Re: Whyis RoadNav not popular?

One of the other problems is that the US Census changed from TIGER-line to ECRI format. The latter format has opensource libraries to decode it, but any conversion programs now need to be rewritten from scratch (or at least the translation into the local displayer format). My own zmapper (originally for the Zaurus, but portable QT3 based) stalled for this reason. Meanwhile, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, MSN Maps... end up working for most things.