Modifying routes

[BuckyE]

I am unable to “grab” a gray-ball route point to drag it to another location. It does not, as far as I can tell, matter how far in or out I am zoomed.

Once a Route has been offered/made, the only result from touching the screen on my iPad is that PocketEarth adds an orange colored Control Point. Perhaps that’s what’s supposed to happen, but the process of modifying a route seems to me to be much easier if I could grab the gray route/Directions points and drag them.

Thank you.

[BuckyE]

This whole routing business is unacceptable. The engine doesn’t understand back roads or direct routes at all. Modifying routes is cumbersome, arcane and inefficient. Good maps, terrible, unusable routing.

[GeoMagik]

The grey dots on the route path represents the instruction turn points only. You can tap on them to see that driving instruction. To control the route’s path, just drag the route line by pressing anywhere on the route line (can press on the grey turn points also), and an orange control point will appear and can be dragged.

The routing engine itself is a 3rd party online service which we have no control over. We do plan to create our own routing engine which will work offline on the device itself, though it will be some time before this is ready.  Even doing this, I am not sure how much better it will be than the current one, as they are based on OSM data, which is lacking much of the needed routing annotations. Fortunately though, this data is constantly improving as the community adds and corrects information.

In some cases, you may benefit from using Waypoints with the GPS Track Recording feature for direct line navigation.  See our Help Manual for more information about this.

[BuckyE]

Thank you very, very much for your patient response to my impolite frustration. I’ve been experimenting a bit more, and have seen a behavior of the CloudMade routing that explains much of my frustrations…

The CloudMade service is adamant about using the “largest” or most major (or whatever the term would be) roads it can find. There doesn’t seem to be any way to convince it to use “shortest distance” routes.

Most of the time this is probably great. But I’m hoping to use PocketEarth for travel in places where we’ll be mostly on “back roads.” Places where we’ll not have a data connection, which is why the offline functionalities are so important and totally wonderful.

So, when I try to use the CloudMade routing and it insists on finding the “most major roads” route, AND I then drag a Control Point to a small road that would provide a much more direct route, the routing continues to insist on adding kinks and backtracking and weird zigzags to try and adapt my new Control Point to whatever larger roads are in the area.

I’ve found that adjusting the placement of the Control Point helps some, and adding more points eventually straightens out the back-roads route I’m trying to create. But this is rather cumbersome.

Perhaps I’m missing some possible function of the current routing software? Is it possible to choose Types of Routes, as on most GPS devices like TomToms or Garmins? My limited experience with those is that they have “avoid traffic” and “shortest distance” and “fastest time” and “avoid tolls” settings. That’s probably my basic problem: I want “shortest distance,” and the CloudMade is insisting on “biggest roads” (or something along those lines).

[GeoMagik]

You are right, we are using CloudMade’s “fastest route” driving mode which tends to take major highways over smaller roads. We will include their “shortest route” driving mode in our next update which will make it much easier to plan scenic routes along smaller roads.

Unfortunately they do not offer “avoid tollways” or “avoid traffic” options, so these will have to wait a bit longer until we find a better routing service or create our own.

[BuckyE]

Thank you very much for your reply. This indeed explains the PocketEarth behavior. As far as Fastest Routes goes, it’s great! I’m confident you’ll give us more options and make PocketEarth even better.

[BuckyE]

I’d like to add a suggestion for future discussion about, perhaps, v1.8. I’m still wrestling with the routing behavior and have seen an odd occurrence. This morning, the Routing Engine decided to include a footpath in my driving route! I could not get the engine to ignore this obviously incorrect “node.” I spent an hour trying to add control points to construct a corrected route, and the engine insisted on taking me back to that node.

I looked at the OSM map in Edit Mode, but am too much of an amateur to figure out what in OSM might have been the problem. Or perhaps the engine is just screwy this morning!

However, If I might, I’d like to suggest that the little gray nodes become editable. In this, I’m assuming there is some data embedded in the OSM that defines “intersections.” Places where roads connect and a driver can turn from one road to another.

Whether PE continues to use the Engine, or constructs its own routing engine, routing in general would be much easier if I could force the route to ignore/skip over a given node/intersection. Perhaps a swipe-delete could be applied to a node?

I realize that at present “The grey dots on the route path represents the instruction turn points only.“ But they must also represent/be based on some OSM data that defines them as intersections. And given that we have to rely on these OSM definitions, which can be incorrect, or can be interpreted incorrectly, I’d like to be able to delete them!

Thank you for your consideration.

[OG2404]

I have issues with the routing system for trekking, mainly because CloudMade screw things and I can’t control that (I thought editing OSM data would help… but it was already correct). Building your own routing system would probably not help a lot.

Here is a suggestion that would solve the situation for me, probably for BuckE here and the issue in this thread as well: allow manual straight line routes in Pocket Earth.

In addition it would allow people to prepare their route in places where there are no tracks/routes or when they do shortcuts.

When adding a Midway destination, you would be able to bypass the routing system and it would put a straight line to connect it to the previous point. You could therefore mix manual straight lines with routes from CloudMade in a single PocketEarth route.

And you could add Directions based on angle (ex: “turn slightly left/right”<45°, “turn left/right” between 45° and 135°, “u-turn left/right”>135°).

Thank you,

Olivier

[BuckyE]

At http://www.geomagik.com/forum/discussion/comment/238#Comment_238 (or at least somewhere in the thread) you can read,

“The current version of PocketEarth has something like this already,
though you must start a GPS Track Recording session to access it.
PocketEarth v1.5 will allow more direct access to it by selecting a Pin
or POI, and choosing the “Track to Here” option from the routing menu.
This will display a straight [geodesic] line from current location to
the waypoint along with distance and azimuth. Multiple waypoints may be
added, however the user must manually choose between them. In v1.5 at
least, you will not have start a recording session to use this
functionality, however the info will still be shown in the Track info
panel as it is in the current version.  After v1.5, we plan to work on
this functionality more to present waypoint navigation in a simpler and
more focused manner (and to automatically switch between waypoints,
waypoint alerts, etc).“

I have no idea what this really means, as I have not tried to construct a route by hand! But perhaps it’s a function you could use? Or at least explore?

[ragnakore]

I first encountered “Waypoint Navigation ” with a handheld Garmin. It was very useful for planning a route on maps that is completely off-road, remote, or by sea/air (impossible for any genius apps to figure an efficient route).

It is a very simple navigation system. On the Garmin handheld, I create a series of waypoints, each having a proximity (arrived distance so to speak). When I set it to start navigating. it would select the first waypoint, then draw a straight line to there (from current location). When I reach the waypoint within the specified proximity, it would choose the next waypoint and draw a line to it. Rinse repeat until the last waypoint is reached.

Personally I want this feature – it is very useful when i go boating.

[GeoMagik]

@BuckyE: It seems the OSM data which Cloudmade uses is horribly out of date, by maybe 6 months (not sure exactly).  If it allowed you to make a driving route over a footpath, its very likely that the path was incorrectly marked in OSM at some point in the past and Cloudmade hasn’t gotten the correction yet.  Not completely sure though, its just a guess.. we have seen things like this before.

@OG2404:  Straight line routes which can be made offline would be handy and we hope to include it in one of our coming update.

[BuckyE]

Ok, I’m not expert enough to be able to check OSM to see what the data actually is. The main problem with this –oh, and, making a route that used the same places, today, brought up the same problem– is that the CloudMade routing REFUSED to allow me to eliminate that node. Somehow, routing in general needs to be able to click on a gray-ball node and eliminate it.

We’ll talk more!

[Author]

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