[conspire] AT&T and CPUC

[Akkana Peck]

Rick Moen writes:
> BTW:  Relevant to disaster response, OpenStreetMap is qualitatively
> better in one key way, relative to commodity corporate mapping services:
> The latter require that resellers (such as Google Maps, Apple Maps,
> etc.) limit how much mapping data a user is allowed to cache, because
> they're just _that_ paranoid about users having an independent copy of
> substantive data.  OpenStreetMap does not.

So true. I can recommend the phone app OsmAnd, which uses offline OpenStreetMap data. You download a state at a time, so you never have to worry about whether you have some region cached at the right zoomlevels. And it's a very mature FOSS app, at least the Android version; my husband tells me the iPhone version isn't quite as good.

Organic Maps is another OSM-based FOSS phone mapping app, but it's less mature and a lot less configurable: for instance, you're stuck with their theme, colors, and amount of detail, so if you need more contrast or more detail (e.g. hiking trails), you're better off with OsmAnd. But OM has its enthusiastic proponents.

> So, for example, I can with trivial effort make code fetching
> OpenStreetMap data mass-download complete map coverage of the San
> Francisco Bay Area -- and keep it.

I don't know of a desktop Linux app or library that can use OSM vector data, unless you build your own tile server which is (or at least used to be) difficult to set up. I've always wanted to add vector layer rendering to my PyTopo mapping app (which currently relies on tile servers) but writing a vector rendering library is a bigger job than I've wanted to tackle.

Rick, what do you do with that downloaded vector data?

        ...Akkana