2024: The year of the OpenStreetMap vector maps

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • OsmAnd

    OsmAnd

    Slightly offtopic

    I have OsmAnd ( https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd ) on my phone, download the basemaps, download my (small) country data (both sourced from open street maps), and with an app + ~1GB of data, I get the maps and full navigation within my country, POIs, etc., and can add other countries when needed.

    Is there something similar for a PC? I can download data from open street maps, but then I need postgres, postgis, a tile server and styles and apache running just to generate the tiles. Is there anything portable (short of running osmand in an android virtualbox) for offline navigation on a linux pc? QGIS can display vectors, but I wasn't able to easily style the data... navigation is a no-go there too. anything else?

  • SaaSHub

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  • tilemaker

    Make OpenStreetMap vector tiles without the stack

    You can download an extract of your country from Geofabrik, run it through Tilemaker (https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker) to get a nice mbtiles file, and then use the built-in Ruby server to give you something you can load in your web-browser locally.

  • omapsapp

    🍃 Organic Maps is a free Android & iOS offline maps app for travelers, tourists, hikers, and cyclists. It uses crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap data and is developed with love by MapsWithMe (MapsMe) founders and our community. No ads, no tracking, no data collection, no crapware. Please donate to support the development!

    There is a beta of Organic Maps for Linux. Check out bottom of this page: https://organicmaps.app/

    I would still want to to know if I can selfhost something of similar, low complexity in my home network.

  • go-openchargemap

    Golang tools for OpenChargeMap

    I happened to be using OpenStreetMaps for the last couple weeks and released a Golang OpenAPI library for OpenChargeMap [1] In that, I released an IPython notebook and used that to visualize the data on Vision Pro [2].

    And I did get it working! But it was not near as cool as it could be because of two dramatic events:

    OSM Foundation violated the trust (nice way to put it) of a participant, OSMBuildings.org, in the search for sponsorship [3] (four years ago, such lost progress :( ) The other is that LeafletJS’s developer is Ukrainian and can’t advance his project [4].

    Please consider those two issues when contemplating donating to OSM due to this press release. While I applaud OSM abstractly, it exists because of a massive amounts of public contributions of IP, not because of $$ from a commercial sponsor.

    [1] https://github.com/neomantra/go-openchargemap

  • Leaflet

    🍃 JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps 🇺🇦

  • OSMBuildings

    3d building geometry viewer based on OpenStreetMap data

    Maybe faux pas to reply to my own comment I made further connections with this.

    I literally had cloned and was fixing OSMBuildings.org because, among other things, it wasn't clamping values correctly [1] -- it's why my charging markers are white. But I felt conflicted doing that. I was happy with what I spiked with OSMBuildings and started exploring commercial services like MapBox and a few other OSS projects.

    Operating projects and companies and organizations is not easy. It sucks what happened there. I'm not a hater and actually looked to Patreon or similar Paul Norman -- and maybe the 'vector tiles' earmark literally means that? But, I'm not happy with that previous behavior of the organization...

    So it's great the OSM Vector Tile service will be dramatically improved...

    If any of us start doing something interesting with, will we get jacked up like OSMBuildings? Is that the stewardship of this donations? That's the rub.

    [1] https://github.com/OSMBuildings/OSMBuildings/issues/230

  • sas.planet.src

  • serverlessmaps

    Creating and hosting serverless maps

    Have a look at https://www.serverlessmaps.com/ which uses PMTiles to generate the tiles from OSM data. It's also possible to host the PMTiles directly on S3 and use HTTP range requests to retrieve the desired bounding boxes. Under the hood, it uses CloudFront as CDN, Lambda@Edge functions and S3 (see architecture at https://github.com/serverlessmaps/serverlessmaps/#architectu...)

    It's a very cost-effective solution as CloudFront has a 1TB/Month free tier, compared to hosted solutions.

  • Openstreetmap

    The Rails application that powers OpenStreetMap

    Way overdue. OpenStreetMap's website at openstreetmap.org is its calling card, and for the past few years the default style shown (called Carto) has all but stagnated in development. Accepted features like highway=busway (introduced three years ago) are not rendered there because the maintainers can no longer be bothered, or dislike the tag personally despite broad community backing.

    What worries me for this new effort is that Paul Norman is one of the two remaining Carto sometimes-active maintainers who refuse to merge contributed PRs or even provide alternative minimal support for features like highway=busway, leading to awkward gaps on the baseline map shown on openstreetmap.org.

    I would love to be surprised in a positive way about this new effort, but I'm not holding my hopes up. Thankfully OpenStreetMap can be thoroughly useful in apps like OsmAnd and OrganicMaps, and the tile-based Tracestrack Topo layer on openstreetmap.org is getting quite decent:

    https://www.openstreetmap.org/#layers=P

  • osmin

    GPS Navigator On-Road/Off-Road for Android and Linux devices

  • pure-maps

    Maps and navigation

  • vector-tile-spec

    Mapbox Vector Tile specification

    Thanks!

    I just browsed the spec again (https://github.com/mapbox/vector-tile-spec/tree/master/2.1) -- I didn't have as bad of a reaction as I did the first time I looked at it.

    I guess the idea of using (Google) protobufs for the "packaging" and then a super tight, custom, byte-encoded format for drawing commands seems... weird to me. But, honestly, it probably makes sense.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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