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One small point about this may be your device’s GPS updating time lag. I’ve noticed that the Pocket Earth Location Blue Ball my iPad 2 is always a second or so behind the actual location of the car. Worse of course at higher speeds!
I have no idea if this is the iPad, PE, or both. But I assume even in the best of all possible worlds, given time between satelitte signal broadcast and reception, software processing, screen draw, etc. there has to be a bit of a lag. (Until, of course, technological and scientific advances make all of this stuff is happen faster than the speed of light. At which point Pocket Earth will be predicting our locations at some user-definable time in the future, right? ;^) ) I’ve noticed that the lag is something I have to anticipate when I use PE in the car to look at the map and give Loie directions.
Perhaps we need the ability to define the amount of lead time we get? To set it longer the faster we travel?
Can’t thank the authors enough. Incredible how many features & functions get added so quickly. Everyone should use this app!
Wow! You folks are terrific! I can’t imagine how you manage to organize all this amazing technology. I’m in awe!
Ah, thank you. I just found out about the “standard swipe-to-delete- function” in another app. I’ll try to remember it better!
Dear GeoMagik,
I agree! I don’t think I ever proposed “skipping the drawing of any POI icons.” If I said something that implied such, I apologize. On the contrary, I have said and I maintain that overlapping is no problem to me. Having more discrete, backgrounded icons will mitigate some of the overlapping confusion. That would be great. I’d be glad to help with creating icons.
I still don’t understand the objection to overlapping. I look at lots of maps and apps that have clumps of overlapping icons. To me, that’s interesting information. It tells me, visually, that there are many sites of interest in that area. Without having to learn or recognize a “cluster” icon. If I’m interested in that area, I zoom in.
To me, a Button on the map that would let me customize my Layers of POIs (eliminating the unwanted over-lappers) without having to switch to Settings would be much more desireable than expanding-cluster icons.
Thanks for listening.
Dear GeoMagik,
Wonderful to hear the metros are probably correctly color coded. Please keep in mind I’d be happy to help OSM with double-checking that, if anyone there feels it might be useful. (I don’t know to whom to speak or how!)
However, Enhancement 2 is much more important than #1. It’s good to know where the line nearest me goes, but it’s critical to know where else I can go, using the overall system. In other words, what transfers may be necessary. Only a total map shows me the latter!
Is the connection/transfers info in OSM good enough that PE could use the standard white-circles-with-black-outlines-and-lines-between to show the connection nodes?
Thank you for considering all these enhancements. PE rules!
Ah, interesting. This is what’s fascinating about Information Management!
If you look back, you see my Groups are initially based on Kinds of Objects: Maps(Destinations), Pins, POI (although I didn’t include that category in my list above). Then on geography/location.
Whereas your list is based on geography, then on Kinds of Objects. I assume you also have a Group for your Destinations (maps) in each country code?
AU Airport
AU Marina
AU POI
AU Destin/Mapsetc.
Thanks for the tip on international country codes. Fascinating how each of us approaches the same goal from different perspectives!
Ah, 60+ “weather centers” for the US. That makes the project much more manageable!
I would agree in principal, with a caveat. The category of white/minor roads is not a fine enough discrimination to use for determining which w/m roads should be shown/hideable-showable. W/m roads can be
1. streets (in town) or
2. long streets that lead out of town to close Large Roads, or
3. local roads between towns.If the same criteria were applied to all three, many towns would show as white blobs/tangles at farther zoom levels: not helpful.
It would be only #s 2 & 3 that I would want to remain on the map as I zoomed out. And those I would want to be able to see, as they often comprise short cuts between towns. Thank you.
“It seems that generally, Métro/Trains are color coded…” OK, that may be, but are they colored with the official colors used on maps & signage? That’s the important point. PE should match what one sees “on the ground,” on signs and posters and maps in the city. So how would one check the tagging which exists in OSM?
I logged in, and could not find any way to access the information for public transport. Sorry. I’d be willing to cross-check it against a couple/few of the official PDFs and JPEGs I have collected for our travel planning. Or, is there a forum I should join to ask about this? That might be easier!
I’m assuming OSM data for buses is not color coded because signage/maps for buses is not usually (at least in my limited experience) color coded by route. I assume because there are just too many routes in any given city to make it possible or technically useful. So buses I’m not worried about!
I see, I see. I still have a bit of trouble switching from my Adobe Illustrator based “drawing” paradigms to a database-based one. It’s good to hear that OSM is way ahead of me by making color-coding available.
My wife and I are frequent travelers, but the printed maps wouldn’t be the way to go. Pretty much any major transport agency now makes PDF maps of their system available online. Downloading those and grabbing the official colors is easy, either by opening the PDF in Illustrator if allowed –for the most accurate color definitions– or by using something like DigitalColor Meter for a reading of the color as it shows onscreen. That’s less accurate, as my monitor is not a calibrated reference type and the PDFs probably won’t have color profiles embedded, but it’d be close enough.
I have an OSM membership and have done some very minor editing there. Let’s let the PE authors chime in: if they think they need help with color coding transport routes, I’d be glad to help for at least the major destinations. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find most of the work has already been done.
Of course PE will have the best Transport Layer ever created!
I found that I could click on the map JPEGs and open them. That didn’t work before! OK, I see two screen shots of center Paris. I assume they are taken from an iPhone?
That seems to my eye to be most of the problem. The icons in your screen shot are rather larger in relation to the map than they ever are on my iPad. I have to zoom in pretty close to make the meat cleaver butcher shop icon at Rue Rambuteau & Rue Quincampoix appear. When that happens, none of the icons around it touch it or overlap on my iPad screen.
It also seems the iPhone icons are not as sharply defined; they fuzz out over each other. Interesting.
In general, it looks to me on both the iPhone screen shots and my iPad like the OSM icons are difficult to see/distinguish at least partially because they are “transparent.” If they had square backgrounds –similar to your PE icons– they would stand out from the map and be easier to decipher.
In general, I’m not bothered by the small amount of overlapping that’s occuring. I’d rather see overlapping POIs appear at much lower zoom levels. With an easier way to show/hide, and easier-to-distinguish-from-the-map icons the overlapping would be perfectly acceptable, visually and in practical terms.
That would be much preferable to me than an expanding-cluster-icon solution.
Thanks for listening!
Dear nounours,
Ah, I understand. The OpenTransportLayer is ugly and not very informative. Thanks for clearing up your intent in referring us to that particular map!
I suppose the over-all approach in OSM is to be globally consistent, whereas I’d much prefer to see color-coding that matched the colors used by the various agencies.
Bucky Edgett
Hmmm, interesting. The included screen shots are too low-resolution for me to see well, but I have to say that I’ve never seen a screen with that many POIs! Where are the locations you’ve shot?
I’ve been looking at the neighborhoods/places we’re interested in visiting over the next year or two and exploring the OSM POIs. I would like the POI icons to be larger! When I zoom in to, say, the Forum in Rome, I set up a Map View on my iPad 2 in horizontal/Landscape orientation. The view measures 0.3 miles across. I’m not seeing any particular overlapping problems, even with Wikipedia Layer turne on. As I zoom out, slowly, I reach what’s obviously a new zoom level and some POI icon disappear. Eliminating overlap problems.
I’m sure you know best the behavior that will satisfy most folks, but I’d be very grateful if you’d consider some form of my request/solution to the overlapping problem and a seperate, but related, problem I’m having.
I’m having trouble seeing the POI icons in all their detail. Not horrible trouble, but some. The icons remain the same –to me, with my old eyes– tiny size at all zoom levels. I’d like to have a Button/Icon on the Map page that would open a slider bar/radio button chooser to define the POI icon size relative to the screen area, not to the zoom level.
If this were the case, I could also use it to reduce/enlarge the icons in the case they were actually overlapping in some major way. (Which I repeat has not actually happened to me in my use of this amazing cool and terrific app.)
Please also consider adding yet another Button to the Map view to access the Map Layers: turning them off and on. So that I didn’t have to switch to the Settings screen and use the stupid On/Off sliders. And so the layers would react in real time, while I looked at the Map, and saw the effect on the –potentially– overlapping POI icons.
Let’s pull an end run around the whole concept of clustering!
Thanks for listening to my probably goofy ideas.
Oh, I’m using the old alpha-numeric sorting work-around already! Thank you, yes.
E.g.:
Maps: Europe
Maps: US
Pins: — Family & Friends (word space/double hyphen/word space to drive this Cat to top of “Pins:” category)
Pins: England
Pins: England – London
Pins: France
Pins: US – Maryland
Pins: US – New York, New York
etc.I’m an old hand at that! But I didn’t think of using the Search to show only certain categories! Excellent suggestion, thanks.
Multiple Grouping I’ve figured out. Incredibly handy, especially for those of us who are becoming more memory challenged every day! ;^)
I’ll be fascinated to explore the utility of your “automatic grouped views” function. I tend to be very old school/literal in my computer use. (It took me forever to admit that Mac OS Spotlight was as or more useful than my obsessive Finder organizing.) So thanks immensely for helping to drag me into the New World of Info Handling!
Ah, thank you. I see how all those things work. It’s amazing how many details there are: I think I never drilled down to the Favorites Star > My POI/My PIns > User Sort > Edit Mode to show the three-bar-dragging-handles!
Good Lord! Are other people savvy enough to find/figure out this stuff? I’m verging on too old to catch on without a much more detailed Help Manual.
This app is incredible. Totally incredible. Can’t thank you enough. Hah, just wait until I figure out how to database the immense heaps of travel info I’ve collected in Adobe Illustrator maps and Adobe InDesign docs and move it to Pins in Pocket Earth. I’ll be unstoppable!
Hey, wait, you did it! I just updated a lot of my map data and now the Map Layers are Categorized! How did that happen? Totally cool. Thank you, thank you! Now let’s synchronise the POIs in Map Layers with the Nearbys and it’s totally totally cool.
Dear nounours,
In Re #1
Please also see my recent post “Public Transport mapping” in this section. The example you provide is so much less than we need! I’m looking for some online example and can’t find a one that really does what should be done.
Yours,
Bucky1. I can now understand the need for re-organizing the OSM POIs! However, I would change:
UNAMED LISTING
Cafe
to
(-CAFE-)
Cafe .
It’s not clear to me, the average user, who might not understand the actual origin of this POI, why it would be “unamed.” Who exactly didn’t name it? Did Pocket Earth just forget to name it? It looks amateurish to call it UNAMED.2. Hmmm. Of course now I see the need for more, special POI icons. That’s very helpful. However, on my v1.5, I have all available Standard Map Layers turned on. I have downloaded for offline use many areas, cities and countries. I don’t see the OSM-based POI icons until I zoom in to a view that encompasses about 2 miles horizontally on my iPad 2. (This is about 12 New York New York city blocks wide.)
At the moment, my view of Midtown Manhattern certainly does not have enough OSM POI icons that they are overlapping. So it seems to me, unless I’m missing something, that “clustering” is not a number one priority.
And, I’m not clear on what you think would comprise “less important POI”s. Important according to whom? I don’t see any way to “rank” the OSM POIs/Map Layers.3. Yes, the schema is good. However, the implementation needs to be collapsible and labeled. For example, when I look at the map of midtown Manhatten, open the search Palette, click on the Nearby tab at bottom, and choose “Public Transport,” I see 3 “Bus Stops,” then an infinitely long list of “Highway: Traffic Signals.” 17 swipes to scroll down to the next category! That category definitely needs to be collapsed by default.
The next “category” is “Lexington Avenue.” Which, now that I’ve been there, I recognize as a subway line. But there’s no indication in this scrolling list that’s what it is! So I need a label, as above, and a collapsed initial presentation. (And the icon is currently a bus, whereas the usual icon for a train/subway is a bus with rails underneath.) Minor points, probably, but labeled, collapsed subcategories, please!4. Now that I’m really rooting around, I’d say please make both the Nearby and the Layers almost the same. (We’ve already established that you don’t want to **exactly** mirror OSM, just include more of their categories for nounours sake! ;^) ) I say “almost” exactly, because there is a confusion between what I’d call “Map Layers” and POIs arising here.
To me, Map Layers would be generic categories of infrastructure and geography. POIs are specific items of structure: stores, fountains, etc. In the Settings list of Map Layers, I’d like to see three categories:
MAP LAYERS
•Hiking
•cycling
•Minor roads
•Forest/land
•Highway #s
•House #s
•Buildings
•Building labels
•Pub Transport
•Public Trans Labels
POINTS OF INTEREST (alpahbetized)
•Accomodation
-subcat
-subcat
-etc
•Food & Drink
-subcat
-subcat
-etc
•etc
-subcat
-subcat
-etc
MY FAV POIs
MY PINS
WIKIPEDIA5. These should exactly mirror the Nearby Search, and both should be similarly iconed and color coded.
Just my two cents, of course! Thanks for listening!
