Thursday, June 19, 2008

Maemo mapper + Yandex maps

Guys, I need map!

After googling for Maemo mapper format I found only this very useful link at internettablettalk with the list of supported servers. But unfortunately it's not that simple for us, Ukrainians. Google Maps does not have streets map even of our capital, Kiev. Russian yandex's map service is still the best, but its format is not that simple as google's:

Yandex Maps:
http://maps.yandex.ua/map.xml?mapID=1600&mapX=%d&mapY=%d&scale=%d
http://maps.yandex.ua/map.xml?mapID=1600&mapX=3397917&mapY=6491641&scale=4&slices=1

mapsID - city's id(from the set of cities)
mapX/Y - special coordinates in wild format:
Map is a 2^31 2-D array, coordinates are central point + shift * 2^(zoom level+8)

Google Maps:
http://mt.google.com/mt?x=%d&y=%d&zoom=%d
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=50.352471,30.256348&spn=4.052146,12.44751&z=7

Very simple: long, lat and zoom :)

That's why is not that simple with Maemo mapper.

May be in a few days I'll test and polish what I got now and create special .deb package for Yandex-only mapper, because there are some changes now which break all other map repositories.

Below is a screenshot(click to see 800x480) of what's working at the moment. To be continued!

11 comments:

  1. Openstreetmap seems to be getting better at a very rapid pace and has good coverage of Kiev at least.
    http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=50.462&lon=30.544&zoom=11&layers=B00FT

    Maybe applying your programming expertise in adapting upstream maemo-mapper to upload GPS traces to OSM directly would help more people.

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  2. I wish I had GPS with my N800. And a car :)

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  3. Max Lapan from Yandex has already demonstrated Maemo Mapper working with Yandex maps about a month ago: http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/52/shmuma.13/0_d16f_26233812_orig

    I think we can ask him to make those changes public...

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  4. 2Alexander Bokovoy:

    That's really great. But isn't is prohibited for Max Lapan as Yandex's employee to write such kind of software and share it? Could you please ask him personally to share his patches with us? And I don't have his contact, wrote a post to his LJ.

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  5. Why should it be prohibited? He is not violating any corporate rules AFAIK. I would still prefer this be done on the server side. How difficult is it for Yandex to provide a URL that takes lat/lon values rather than their internal offsets?

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  6. Yeah, I understand. Besides, this guy already contacted my and suggested a great idea about maemo-mapper plugin script. I'm already in progress with it.

    Here is a Yandex's user agreement in russian:

    "Условия использования

    Любая информация, размещенная на сайте Службы, включая картографические материалы и данные о дорожной ситуации (состоянии загруженности автомобильных дорог) в г. Москве (далее — «Данные») предназначена исключительно для личного некоммерческого использования. При этом любое их копирование, воспроизведение, переработка, распространение, размещение в свободном доступе (опубликование) в сети Интернет, любое использование в средствах массовой информации и/или в коммерческих целях без предварительного письменного разрешения правообладателя запрещается, за исключением случаев, прямо предусмотренных настоящим Соглашением. Данные защищены законодательством о защите информации и интеллектуальной собственности."

    my translation:

    "All the information on this site including cartographical data and information about road traffic in Moscow city(further Data) is intended only for private non-commercial usage. Any copying, reproducing, reworking, distribution, publishing for public access in Internet, any usage in mass media and/or commerial usage without prior agreement with property owner is prohibited."

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  7. Well, the Maemo Mapper requests maps from the server, just like any normal web browser, and then presents maps to the end user. It does not do anything extra. Therefore, none of "копирование, воспроизведение, переработка, распространение, размещение в свободном доступе (опубликование) в сети Интернет, любое использование в средствах массовой информации и/или в коммерческих целях" occurs.

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  8. But there is a copying of the data files from Yandex's server as Maemo-mapper then will not be using yandex anymore and rather querying its sqlite database.

    So Yandex loses ads distribution among their users as there is no need to go to web anymore. I think they paid some big money for this map to Russian/Ukrainian map government services and don't want anyone to copy it to their PDAs giving nothing in exchange. Especially if this is theшу employee who make such kind of software.

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  9. But there is a copying of the data files from Yandex's server as Maemo-mapper then will not be using yandex anymore and rather querying its sqlite database.
    It is caching, technically not different from what web browser does.

    So Yandex loses ads distribution among their users as there is no need to go to web anymore.
    It's true, but I somehow doubt they will do anything about such an extremely niche market as NITs, especially considering the fact that their usage terms allow such use. Just not worth it.

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  10. Yandex only version is a BAD idea. Yandex is good service but I'm using Google and OpenStreets today for Moscow city and have a decent cache on database. So I see no clue in yandex-only version of app but rather it will be better if Maemo Mapper will be learned to understand such repo format as well. Best thing IMHO is to cooperate with author of Maemo Mapper and add this as a feature to maemo mapper. Having one mapper per repository is a real headache for end users.

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  11. 2kindaunique:

    Yeah, I already received complaints about it. And a solution that works. There will be script-proxy server on a tablet that will perform calculations and requests to Yandex in its format. Scripts will be started and killed automatically when launching maemo-mapper. I'll post to Planet when it's ready.

    Thanks for your interest.

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