Project for people leaving Google Maps.

hedge@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 301 points –
14

For those who don't use Google services, but still need voice navigation, just wanted to mention RH Voice, which is available on F-Droid. Has worked well for me so far when using Organic Maps.

I just love how natural Kaldi sounds. A bit more convoluted to get up and running, but it sounds really great.

Good and all, but as somebody mentioned on the Masto comments this shouldn't be needed, this is taking an open JSON file and turning it into a proprietary Google-only format so that Organic Maps can import it, that feature should be on the app itself already.

Also as you're uploading that data to a random website you're effectively doxxing yourself as your important addresses likely will be there, your home, your workplace, etc.

Edit: Was mistaken and corrected below, the format IS a standard, not proprietary, in addition the author answered in Masto clarifying that all the conversion happens in the browser without uploading anything. That said, i do insist that the app should support uploading in this geojson format, specially since it's what Google Takeout gives you

proprietary Google-only format

Keyhole Markup Language

KML became an international standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium in 2008.

(...)

The KML 2.2 specification was submitted to the Open Geospatial Consortium to assure its status as an open standard for all geobrowsers.

I understood it was Google-only, great to be mistaken about it. Still, the app should also support that geojson importation format too, there shouldn't be a need for external tools, SPECIALLY since it's what Google Takeout gives you, this very much should be a feature of the app.

Now that this project exists, I'm sure it'd be relatively trivial to implement in the app

I doubt the actual "feature" is much more than a single line that tells GDAL to translate it from one format to the next, so the real thing here is the convenience of having a webpage that provides this special case as a service. Geojson is easy to read in essentially every language now, so this shouldn't have been hard to do even before this website.

People save Google places? Who the hell needs to save 3000 of them? Wtf

Hilariously, I have about the same number saved. It's all kinds of places that I've been, want to go to, or just want to keep saved as reference, from all over the world. They just kinda built up over the years and I'm thankful for this thread because I want to make the switch.

It's all place to eat and place to go and place to hike and interesting place i heard people talking about. I have about 100+ of these and I don't really go around much.

Does Organic Maps has the social aspect of Google Maps? Maps is the only thing Google I wasn't able to quit yet, whenever I want to go to a restaurant I NEED to look at the pictures of the food and read reviews. I discovered such amazing gems with it.

Unfortunately there are very few open review projects and none that people have tried to actually integrate into one of the OSM apps. It makes me rather disappointed as finding businesses and checking reviews is one of the most common uses I have for Google Maps and yet OSM cannot replace it.