[aprssig] UI-View32 Maps?

[Greg Troxel]

Stephen H Smith via aprssig <aprssig at lists.tapr.org> writes:

>     All the CD/DVD-based mapping products that worked locally on a
>       computer without Internet access (Microsoft MapPoint, Delorme
>       Street Atlas, Precision Mapping, Delorme Topo USA) are now
>       discontinued.  A victim of the foolish belief that cellular data
>       access is ubiquitous, and that you can get maps from the Internet
>       no matter where you are.

You are quite right about the craziness of online-only  maps and it is
amazing how many people do not understand that it could be any other way.

Hoewver, this problem exists only within the world of proprietary map
data, where some entity prohibits you from having the data offline.

With OpenStreetMap, available under an open data license, you can have
the data locally and operate offline.  The main requirement is to
display attribution and (roughly) follow share-alike for the database.

I run OsmAnd on my phone, and have downloaded OSM data for all of New
England through about DC, plus a few other places.  I can not only
display maps but also compute routes, with no internet access at all,
and I've done this, driving from Moab, UT to Bryce Canyon, where there
is over an hour of no service on I-70.  It only takes a few GB for this
data, and the maps are far richer than the old Delorma maps.

Here is a project that has a java library to read/display offline maps,
and code to make mapfiles from the OSM data.  I use this too, and all of
New England is under 1 GB.

  https://github.com/mapsforge?tab=repositories

One can also load the data and generate map tiles with custom styling,
and style the map in a browser from vector tiles (that have the raw
data, not a rendered map).

(I do not know anything about UI-View32 and what it would take to modify
the source code to use a different map library.)

73 de n1dam