yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Cipher:
Ok, I think I've found the reason for slow downloads. I forgot about a slight change in the download code between the actual version and the last ones.

It will be fixed in the next release. Thank you for the feedback!
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Cipher:
Please try this version: omm_dev.cab.

And tell me if the following issues are fixed for you:

- textbox input lags

- osmcache folder creation

- maps/configure crashes after editing

- crashing when installed in device memory.

Please also try the development version from above and tell me if the downloading is faster for you, now.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] mobiljoe:
Hi,

The dev version has shown no change. However, I've found that I now work with earlier versions have serious download problems. Also the download via Wi-Fi works is, in my opinion but also too slow.

I now have tried the various versions and always have the same problem. In addition I have uninstalled everything and deleted the osmcache. Is that enough? Or are of more information in the registry. I have found none.

Other programs such as Google Maps or Opera Mobile work very well.

I hope you will find a solution, because the program I find great.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Cipher:
This is indeed a very strange behavior. You mean even the older versions are slow, now? The latest dev version is definitely a bit faster. I can confirm this even in my emulator tests. If it doesn't work for you then I'm afraid that I can't help you.

OMM leaves no information in the registry. Deleting osmcache folder and the ommconfig.xml is enough to delete any configurations of OMM.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] mobiljoe:
So, now I have started at vers 1.1.3673.41233 and implemented incremental updates. Until vers 1.2.3726.4355 (nightly build) works the download. Since Ver 1.2.3732.42197 there are problems.

Actually I had thought that the vers 1.2.3732.42197 and the vers 1.3.3743.1132 (nightly build) works. But no longer. Had probably misled me. Probably the cards were still in the cache. Sorry for the wrong info.

I use a wap-flat rate of Vodafone. (Using a proxy). Maybe it has to do with it?
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Cipher:
You say you are using a proxy. This could be the reason. I will look into my code and report back.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] hurricane3000:
Hi Cipher

I tryed the new dev version and I can say you that in this version many important problems are been solved.

Now the program seem stable and the osmcache folder is correctly created and used.

Now no crash occured during use of program (it seems).

It works equally if installed on device or Storage card.

I made a useful test:

After unistalled the program, I renamed the created osmcache to save it and its contains.

I don't know if the program each time is installed re-create a new (empty) osmcache, but if yes I advice you that preserve an eventually already existing cache.

Then I reinstalled the program, and rewritten the new osmcache with previous. The program have used the cache (with stored tiles) correctly.

About the textbox input lags, seems that the problem is reduced or less visible.

Also the download speed seems a little improved (but I am not sure).

I not tryed yet the maps/configure crashes after editing, (but I am almost sure that the problem is been solved).

Some advices:

Sincerely I don't like the initial big spash-screen. I would prefer that the program become operative as soon as possible (or at least to reduce to the minimum durate a smaller splash-screen).

I would prefer more fast and efficient standard menus than actual (for the context menu I have no preferences, even if generally I prefer the standard one).

In mobile applications (depending on application) often is preferably to privilege the efficency.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Cipher:
Great. This is overall a very positive feedback. I'm relieved that the latest optimizations have a positive effect on other users' hardware, too.

To address your suggestions:

I will remove the Wait-Timer on the splash screen. It is set to 5 seconds right now. So it should show the map 5 seconds faster on start...
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] hurricane3000:
About reduced download speed.

Hi,

I made an interesting test about to compare GoogleMaps and OpenMobileMaps that can help to PARTIALLY explain the different downloading speed:

With GMapMaker I created 2 IDENTICAL maps (same area) of center area of Paris (with high specific image-density per tile) using zoom 17 level.

One using tiles from Google and another using tiles from OSM.

To create these 2 maps (mosaic of tiles) are been downloaded 255 tiles (256 x 256 pixels) from Google (for Google map) and of course identical number of tiles (256 x 256 pixels) from OSM server (for OSM map).

These tiles are been stored in 2 different folders (and both OSM and Google tiles are been downloaded in .png format).

Well I discovered that the folder containing 255 OSM tiles is 3.19 MB Size while that containing 255 Google tiles is 2.06 MB size.

This means that average size of each OSM tile is 12.509 KB (3190000 / 255) while the average size of Google tiles is 8078 KB (2060000 / 255).

This means that each tile from OSM maps compared with the correspondig tile (covering identical area) from Google map is (averaged) 55% greater (in Bytes).

I made the test also using the zoom level 13 (for the same area), and I noted that the above results are been confermed.

But with this zoom level the needed tiles are been only 4 (with a relative reduced difference).

I also noted that difference of tiles size (for same area) can change depending on complexity (image density) of tiles.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] hurricane3000:
Hi Cipher,

Please explain me something of your application:

If during the normal use (with the map on screen), I open the menu but I change idea and I don't want change nothing in menu, It seems that there is no direct way to exit from menu and go back to the map. Or simply I do not see the way?

Almost the same problem there is if I enable/disable the Controls button in the menu. There is no direct way to go back to map.

It seems that program is missing some adapted way to exit from menu (after used it or not).
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Cipher:
Please have a look at the Feature Documentation in my development blog. I'm explaining your question and all the other features there.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] sonora:
Some smaller bugs and improvement suggestions

Hi Cipher,

Your OMM viewer is great stuff!

I have looked through some of the features, and found the following smaller bugs or improvement requests. Maybe you want to consider this for future releases:

(1) Display the current zoom level somewhere. This could be done with 2 digits on the zoom handle itself (I mean the slider button in the zoom bar), for instance

(2) The number of ticks (intervals, or notches the zoom handle can sit on) seems slightly off: You display a total of 16 ticks (excluding the left-most and right-most onto which you apparently cannot move the zoom handle to). But you seem to support 18 zoom levels (1-18).

(3) Also: Zoom level 0 does not seem to be supported. (If you change this, too, you would need 19 ticks the zoom handle can sit on.)

(4) It would be nice to have longer ticks for zoom levels 5, 10, 15,for instance, for better orientation.

(5) For people who download certain zoom levels only from a tile server and copy them to the osmchache directory, would it be possible display these tiles while in offline mode, even if the zoom level actually viewed is not the one available in cache? The "nearest zoom level" tiles could for instance be displayed as 'squares with purple margin' if zoom level viewed is lower than the "nearest zoom level tiles" available in cache, or as solid purple squares/background (instead of just white/checkered), if the only tiles available in cache are for higher zoom level. As it is today, cached tiles for different zoom levels are not shown at all, and you may miss that they are in cache entirely (unless you happen to zoom to exactly the correct level).

(6) Disabling "Settings/Allow Downloads" seem to also mess (or make impossible) up the fuctionality "Allow GSM locationing", but does not seem to disable this function in the menu at the same time

(7) I am not sure what the functionality of the green 'x' works as intended: Clicking a position on the screen places a green x, but subsequent zoom action (pressing '+') seems to zoom into the center of the screen, not towards the position of green x. Is this a bug?

So much for today.

Thx!
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Cipher:
This will be implemented in version 1.4.

That's right. You cannot move the handle to zoom level 1 or zoom level 18. This is a bug. But it goes to those two zoom levels if you tap on + or - when you are in level 17 or level 2. So it actually works.

Level 0 makes no sense as it is just 1 tile for the whole world. This is why a left it out.

I'll see how this would look like..

I already implemented such a feature this weekend. It will be released with version 1.4.

Mainly the function is this: if there is no tile for the actual zoom level, OMM looks for the tile in a lower zoom level. The desired area is cut out and enlarged to match the actual zoom level. For version 1.4 the algorithm does not look for tiles in higher zoom levels, but maybe I will implement this in a later release.

I will make it more visible that GSM locationing depends on an internet connection for the next release.

The green cross marks the positions for setting start or finish to calculate a route. Perhaps it'll be less irritating if I make it invisible right after zooming.

I can't tell when I will release version 1.4 as I'm in the middle of developing it.

Another long awaited feature (I'm currently working on) will be multi-language support.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] sonora:
Screen zoom feature

Hi Cipher,

perfect! Thank you for the quick reply! I have one more idea, after discussing with a few people: Many have devices where the resolution is not optimal fo reading some of the map labels, like street names, under all circumstances or lighting conditions (outdoors). Would it be possible to implement a "display-magnification button" that temporaily enlarges the picture displayed by a factor of 2 in each direction? (Pls. note that this is different from "map zooming", which just switches to another tile, but labels will end up as small as before. I am talking about actually (temporarily, upon request) enlarging/stretching the pixels displayed.)

Thx!
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] hurricane3000:
Some questions.

Hi Cipher.

Can you clear my doubts please about following questions?

Is there a limit of storable tiles in the cache, or the limit is given only by the available memory?

If yes, the limit is the number of tiles or the amount of memory that them uses?

Can the general responsiveness of program (or some part of it) be affected by little or great number of stored tiles?

In other words, can the program (or some part of it) to be less or more responsive and efficent, depending on the number of stored tiles?

Thanks
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Cipher:
Your storage card's filesystem specifications are the only limits.

the app does not care how many tiles are stored. and it does not affect performance of the app the more tiles are cached.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Cipher:
this should be easy to implement. but i can't promise wheither this will already make into v1.4.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] hurricane3000:
I asked the question also to try to explain the not satisfating performance in the download speed.

I imagine that OMM works in this way:

Before to download a new tile, it check if the needed tile is already stored in the cache.

Mathematically the time needed to search in a short list of tiles is not the same than time needed to end the seach in a long list.

Then a long list of tiles can affect indirectly the downloading speed.

Or I am mistaken? If not you can consider this aspect.

Independently of above question, to store many tiles, indirectly is possible to take some advantage from it.

Surely you know that someone developed a very useful open source C# .Net Framework application (but unfortunately not for Windows Mobile) that given 2 opposite edge coordinates and a zoom value, after downloaded all tiles covering that area, it merges them in a single map image that can be used (already calibrated) by other gps programs. I often use it to create big maps images.

I think that to add this further feature in OMM can be a good idea (and not excessilvely expensive as added code).

Of course this new feature would be sufficentely indipendent to not degrade the main and original purpose of OMM.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Cipher:
OMM does not keep a list of cached tiles. It just checks whether the file exists or not. This is why it doesn't care how many tiles are actually cached.

I don't see the reason why OMM should create a big image out of many tiles? This would rather affect performance if you have to wait for one big image to load and display compared to many tiles that are loaded and displayed independently.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] hurricane3000:
May be I am been to sufficentely clear in my prompt.

Of course the new feature that I suggested to add in OMM will not run at same time (while OMM works as gps).

In other words is the same as to have 2 application in 1, both exploiting the common cache (but not used simultaneously).
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Cipher:
Ok, and maybe it should be also possible to make coffee with OMM? ;) Joking..

Sorry, but your suggestion has nothing to do with OMM. It is a complete different requirement.

OMM's main focus is to be an atlas application for different map providers based on the OSM specs. It's not OMM's concern to transform maps into some other format. There are other tools which do a great job doing that.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] hurricane3000:
I partially agree with you. Generally I prefer to have 2 different application that each execute WELL his (and only 1) specific work than 1 application that execute bad 2 different work.

But here the point is another:

As the most of code and 100% of the cache can be considered common elements between the 2 different works, would must be interesting to consider to exploit these common elements.

In all cases, I simply launched to you an idea of course, that you can consider or not.

Please don't try to make OMM able to make coffee.....because I have an HTC Touch HD, not an IPhone.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] mobiljoe:
Hi,

have you found a solution or explanation why the download stopped working suddenly for me?
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] hurricane3000:
Hi Cipher,

I have some doubts that a large cache do not affect the performance of OMM, because to check if a filename exist or not, it involves a real searching in the file sistem\folder.

Also if apparentely it can seems a different approach in reality C.F traslate the command in a very efficent searching.

It's not difficult to test this point.

Using OMM, I noted that when OMM need to fill the map with new tiles, it seems that often it choose the tile to dowload with a different criteria than that used by mobile google maps. May be that this impression is given by the different size of tiles, but I think that can be a good idea to check if the criteria used by OMM can be improved.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Cipher:
Sorry, I had a busy week and I didn't have time for coding. But, I will look into it this weekend..
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Cipher:
You are trying to make coding suggestions without having insight into the code of OMM. This is a bit pointless.

I wrote, that OMM does not care how many tiles are in the cache. Wheither .Net's File.Exists() function is slower if you have more files in the cache or not is not my problem. If you want to be exact there is even a file limit per folder for FAT filesystems. But this is not my concern. I pass this problems through to the filesystem which implementation should be efficient enough.

And last but not least: I know users who have thousands of tiles on their storage cards and they love OMM that it can handle these amounts without any problem. I myself have more than 40.000 tiles in my osmcache.

And of course OMM uses a different algorithm to determine in which order tiles are downloaded than google mobile. But this does not matter. My algorithm for selecting tiles does not slowdown the process. But I won't go into details as this would require a lot more explanation.

Some things I've noticed are that "freezes" occure more often if your memory is low. This is because the garbage collector kicks in and locks the system as long as it is collecting garbage. This results in a few seconds where nothing happens on screen and you can't do anything.

I also noticed that I'll have to catch some OutOfMemoryExceptions especially for older devices with less memory and handle them somehow.

But this is something that is on my list for v1.4. This version will be fully packed with optimizations, bug fixes and stability improvements. The feature list will be rather small...
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] hurricane3000:
In the fact I confirm you that this is exactely one of the problems that I often encountered.

I can add that I have had the impression that the "freezes" occures more often immediately after OMM started instead than during the normal use. Something like "freezes" occures also during the normal use, but in this case it appears more similar to a very slow work than a "freezes".

If can help you, here is the usual memory status of my device before I launch OMM:

Store Memory (not Stogage card memory): Total 321.05 Mb, In use 43.91 MB, Available 277.14 MB.

Program Memory: Total 195.46 MB, In use 54.82 MB, Available 140.64 MB.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] hurricane3000:
Hi Cipher,

Here a list of highly reccomanded changes/improvement to OMM that I consider almost necessary.

1 - I tryed to run OMM on a Windows Mobile 2003 SE PDA (HP HX4700, top of pda until some year ago). When I need to use gps navigation aid in the car, without doubts I prefer to use this Pda instead my Htc Touch HD (If you know HX4700 probably you can understand the reasons).

In both my devices I installed Google Mobile maps and OziExplorerCE, and both works perfectly and with great satisfaction.

As I updated the HX4700 with C.F. 3.5, I tryed to run OMM in this Pda.

Of course I noted that it does not works in all application functions, but it have a great desire to become working.

Built-in map is displayed correctly in both portrait and landscape mode, and in both 240x320 and 640x480 resolution mode.

I understood that it is inhibited to works normally only for some few particulars.

For example OMM do not allow to set the gps data-port (probably it only uses the gps intermediate driver.

When I launched OMM (first time after installation), I noted the following behaviour:

The splash-screen remains indefinitely on the screen until I tap the screen.

This happens only first time, because next times it disappears normally.

At this point OMM ask me if I want allow or not downloads (I set Yes).

Then appears the buit-in map. OMM do not asked me where I want create the cache.

Then I tap on main-menu button and it open normally.

Then I tap on setting button (or others) but at this point nothing happens, except that the main-menu is closed and re-appears the map. I try again to open the main-menu but it's not longer possible.

Like you can easily understand the step to make OMM working also on such devices is not to long.

Is there some hope that you will extend the use of OMM to Windows Mobile 2003 devices?

2 - Actually OMM simply use a pushpin to indicate the position. But there is no indication/perception of direction where user is going. Is not a case that Google in the last versions of the program introduced a rotating arrow to indicate it. Then I advice you to change the actual pushpin in a red (well visible) rotating arrow and other pushpin in small circles or squres.

3 - I would find very useful to display on the map a short track (not longer than the screen-size) indicating the just covered road.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] heart_crafter:
Awsome App!

Finally Read the whole thread... woo... (after figuring out how it works...)

Took me a while to figure out how to download maps using JTileDownloader and where i was suppose to copy the tiles...

1. First i thought i can add Maps by using the "Add" button in Maps form...(that did not work, error app quit (now i know what happned...))

2. Then i tried editing the xml file figured out i could not edit it...(this was the reason why i could not add or edit the map config)

3. Unchecked the read-only attribute option, and now i can edit the config or add maps (no errors while editing).

I installed it yesterday... it’s working prety good, downloading maps with the zoom level 1-6 using JTD (took a min to figure out zooming left is the lower number. I saw in older post about it and you consider adding this in later ver)

Even though I can’t use the direction/search feature (because I am in US), I still love the OFFLINE MAPS with GPS!

I read people complaining about the downloading speed: They should learn how to use the JTileDownloader (and defrag your storage card after downloading) instead of downloading tiles from mobile internet or even activesync or even wifi.

Short Tutorial how I made it work:

This is how I used JTileDownloader

Downloaded the PC version

Clicked on Area tab

Min Lat: -85.0511

Max Lat: 85.0511

Min Long: -179.9

Max Long: 179.9​

Clicked Continue Menu

Target: OpenStreetMap

Path: C:\OSM

Min Zoom: 1

Min Zoom: 6

Mode: Normal​

Clicked Download​

After downloading all the tiles, Copied C:\OSM contents in the OSMCACHE (storage card in my case) folder located at where ever you choose when you run OMM!

Feature Request:

Under Info > if GPS option is selected in Settings: If GPS is connected show how many satellites are connected else show GPS initializing or No GPS Signals (I couldn’t make sure yet if OMM initialize the GPS MSFT API Port by it self or not. How ever many times I tried to use the GPS in OMM I had to run my HTC GPS Tool to Open “MSFT API Port” from it and then run OMM to make it see the GPS.)

Maybe add browse buttons to the right of the paths you can edit in Maps form.

Fix Request:

Maybe making sure maps.xml is not ready only before trying to write to it.

If I move the map on zoom 2 to far up or down, it moves the image but it does not retain the exact image location when click_up. It works fine when I move the map little by little about 100 pixels at a time.

That’s it for now…

Thanks again for an Awesome App!

Device:

HTC Touch Pro2 with Built-in GPS

WM 6.5 Pro

CE OS 5.2.23559
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] minisaw:
the app is slow as hell on xperia x1. pretty much unusable.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] -=|MisterY|=-:
Issues using Storage Card

I got a problem with the latest stable version (22382). Can not make it use Storage Card. Even though I select the option on the first run to use storage card, the maps are being stored in the device root.

Going to the settings and changing map location crashes the app.

If I remove the <storage> tag from config and then select device root as the storage, the application crashes.

Edit:

I removed the config xml file and uninstaled the app. After the new installation it is fine but it still creates osmcache directory in the root of the phone. It creates one in Storage Card, as well.

This is weird! Some of the tiles get stored on Storage Card, some in the root osmcache. :S
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] hurricane3000:
In the page 30 there is a link of a development version where some of your problem is been fixed.