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Hi! Bought your app and like it.
How to download whole country for pure offline use? We’re goint to NZ for 3 weeks and will not have data access there on iPad. I see no download buttons as in Mapswithme…[Edited to reflect the simpler v2.0 procedure!]PocketEarth allows you to download as many countries, regions or cities as you like in full detail. There are few ways to do it:1. Find a place you want to download using any one of these methods:• Go to the main menu and tap All Maps. Enter a text search and/or tap on a continent and drill down to the place you want offline!• When zoomed out to a wide view on the map tap the place on the map you want and it will be displayed in the Info Panel at the top of the screen.• To download the place you are currently viewing on the map, go to the main menu, and it will be listed above All Maps in the Maps section. Tap on it to select.2. Tap the star icon on the place you have chosen in step 1. Pocket Earth will ask you if you want to download it for offline use!3. This place will now be listed in the My Maps section of the main menu and will show a color coded star to reflect its offline map cache status:• A Green star indicates that all map data for the Destination has been downloaded and is available offline.• A Yellow star indicates the download is in progress and will turn green when it completes.• A Red star indicates that the maps will not be downloaded in full because you declined to download them.Wikipedia & Guides:If you have enabled Wikipedia Articles in Settings > Manage Data > Wikipedia > ON, then all articles will be downloaded automatically for all destinations with a green or yellow star and will display on the map. Wikivoyage Travel Guides work a bit differently, its a single download including all guides over the world! These guides are listed in the Guides section of main menu.Advanced:Pocket Earth now offers a way to download more overview maps for the whole world. This is mainly useful if you like checking out many places over the earth or want to use it as an offline atlas. Just go to Settings > More Settings and enable Increased Base Map Cache in the Advanced section. Technically what this is doing is simply downloading and caching all the low/mid resolution maps from zoom levels 0 – 9 (when setting is off, it only stores 0 – 6 globally for offline use).Personally, I find PocketEarth’s *method* for downloading maps very difficult to use and at times confusing. Let me explain:
Let us assume I am looking at the whole continent of Europe; I see a lot of countries. When I tap on France, I am given the chance to download all maps of France. While downloading, I pinch zoom into Paris, tapped on it and am given the chance to download all maps of Paris. Here is the question. Are these two maps distinct/different? Is the map of Paris already included in map of France? ie, can I delete the map of Paris?
I prefer a more intuitive method of download maps by defining the area we want to download. I suggest to divide the screen into grids and we swipe each grid to mark for download. Once we are satisfied with the area, we can click a “Go Download” button to start the download. We should also be given the option to name these areas.
One thing I would like to HIGHLY commend/praise PocketEarth’s map is it’s use of Vectored Map vs image maps. Vectored Map is best! An alternative “image map” app (MotionX) would take hours to download Paris but only seconds with PocketEarth.
PocketEarth will never try to download the same area twice. If you mark Paris and France for download, they will share data for the overlapping area. Un-starring Paris will not delete its maps since it is covered by France as well. On the other hand un-starring France may cause maps of france to be removed, but not those for Paris (assuming Paris is still starred green).
We have a Custom Destination feature planned for one of our coming releases. It will allow you to mark a custom area on the map and name it. The Custom Destination would be listed under Favorites > My Destinations and be downloaded just like normal ones!Marking a
custom area and naming it would help but why don’t use already existing naming convention? Europe is divided into countries, most countries are divided into departments.
Please implement downloading maps by countries and departments. Similar feature is available
in Nokia Maps, Navigon and OpenMaps.Hi Jarek,
You can already browse and search for places in such a way as you described. Just tap the Search button on the map, and select the Destinations tab. Here you will find more than 100,000 places listed by Continent > Country > Region (Department) > City. Tap the blue map icon in top right to view the currently selected place on the map, and you can star it to download all of the maps or just to have it listed in My Destinations on the Favorites screen for easy access later on.In addition to the current way of downloading maps, I would really like to be able to say “Download all maps of Norway”. This would allow me to be sure that all maps I can possibly get for that country are downloaded, down to the most detailed tiles. Similarly, if I am interested in a particular region of Norway, I would like to be able to say “Download all maps of Rogaland”. Alternatively, this could be done using the currently displayed area. For instance, if I am showing Norway, that will also include areas of Sweden and Finland, using thsi feature would download all available maps of the displayed area. The issue here is that I would rather download unnecessary maps than finding myself without web access and not the map I need. This is the entire purpose of off-line mapping!
You can already download all maps (including all zoom levels) of any country and many regions/cities. Just find the country/region/city in the destinations list and tap the star icon to save it as a favorite. At this point you will be asked if you want to download the maps for the place.
Is their any simple way to download all maps for all countries and cities without having to select each one, one at time? We would like to configure PocketEarth with maps for the entire planet once, when we install the app, then access any of those maps later when the iPad is permanently out of touch with the internet.
One small improvement when viewing the map from Destinations is to show the selected map one zoom level out.
Now the selected map (be it a city, region or country) is zoomed in a little too much. The yellow area is almost always filling the whole screen, and often a part of the selected yellow area is falling outside of the screen. I think zooming out one level gives a better orientation of the selected destination.Another issue concerning the offline maps is that I think it is too easy to deselect a downloaded area. For instance, when a country is selected which has been downloaded the star icon is green. When tapping the star icon by accident the maps are removed from My Destinations. (It will be still there in the cache, but for how long?)
A message warning about removing the selected map area would be nice. (The same goes for pins.)
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