Blog of Anders Rune Jensen » OSM

AndNav2 is now Open Source

Anders Rune Jensen — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:14:41 +0000

Wow this is quite a nice suprise. Nicolas gave in and released the source of AndNav2. So I can now spend my time hacking that instead of reverse-engineering it I rooted my HTC Hero so I actually don’t need to do that anymore, but that is really beside the point. With the source available there is no ends to what can be done

As I have said before, I really think this is a killer app for Android. Google released their navigation which is nice, but I’m not sure how well it works in offline mode.

Andnav2 working on Hero again

Anders Rune Jensen — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:49:53 +0000

First a short background. HTC Hero released with android 1.5. Google releases android 1.6 with TTS (text-to-speech) support. Andnav2 working fine since it uses external tts library. Author of Andnav2 (Nicolas) releases version compatible with android 1.6, but leaves all users of 1.5 devices out in the cold. The update was uploaded to marked with NO warning. After many talks back and forth Nicolas finally agrees to release a version that at least starts up on 1.5, but still crashes when using turn navigation. HTC announces that they are working on a new firmware based on 2.0, but release has not yet been determined.

So with that history out of the way, I now announce a version of AndNav2 that works on HTC Hero by simply removing all the calls to TTS. You can download the version here. Please note that you need to uninstall your previous version of andnav2 first as this version is simply signed with the android beta key.

I could have removed all the ads as well, but that was not the point of this reverse engineering. I simply want to be able to use a program, which in my view, is the killer app for the android phone. Don’t get me started on Google Maps with navigation. It’s US only, not based on OSM, and works only on android >= 1.6.

Enjoy

Andnav2, open maps for the android

Anders Rune Jensen — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 20:48:45 +0000

As I was researching the android platform before buying a HTC Hero, one of the things that really got me excited was the mappping/gps application andnav2. It’s a frontend for openstreetmap, that uses the open routing service to provide turn-by-turn, all for free. The only thing is that it requires is a internet connection for routing, but it’s not really a problem as a route is only a few kilobytes. Maps can be preloaded onto the device also, for situations where one doesn’t have an internet connection available (like when traveling). I used the nice TrekBuddy atlas creater application to fill the device with maps of all of Denmark, London, Berlin and Europe at a decent level.

I was really impressed by the openstreetmap when I was in Corsica earlier this month. I had preloaded maps onto the device before going and it really served us well as the rented car didn’t have a GPS, and my other GPS of course didn’t have maps for Corsica. This was using the excellent maemo mapper and the Nokia N810, but it should be the same with the android.

The user interface of andnav2 could use a lot of cleaning. It’s not very user-friendly, but it will hopefully improve. As the coverage of openstreetmap improves, it will be harder and harder for companies like Tom Tom to ask 750kr for their mapping application like on the iPhone.

Also as the search interface in android marked sucks hard (of the irony Google), one needs to enter andnav2 and not andnav, as that will only show the older version.

Happy mapping!

Edit: The author released a new version, that only works on android > 1.6 (because of TTS), and appears to not really care about older versions of Android. I have approached him multiple times asking for him to fix it, sadly he’s been playing the silent ninja. Just making the old binary available would be fine, but sadly no. Since the source is not available there isn’t much we can do except wait for HTC to release the 2.0.

Edit2: Working version available here: http://people.iola.dk/arj/2009/11/25/andnav2-working-on-hero-again/

A new frontend to openstreetmap

Anders Rune Jensen — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:36:42 +0000

Was reading the blog of cloudmade today and found that they have a similar service to maps.google.com, called oddly enough maps.cloudmade.com. Instead of maps.google.com this uses openstreetmap as its source of data. This map seems to work a lot nicer than the frontend at openstreetmap.org. And shows more things like gas stations and shopping posibilities as one can see here:

Google maps vs openstreetmap

Anders Rune Jensen — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:12:53 +0000

This graphical analysis / visualization is quite interesting.

Openstreetmap 2008

Anders Rune Jensen — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:22:26 +0000

Very cool and inspirational video showing the progress of openstreetmap in 2008.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.