On 21/07/2010 11:48, Andy Allan wrote:
Initially sounds cool, but I have no idea what it actually is, or how cool it actually is :-) If someone can translate from "Wayfinder talk" to OSM language (e.g. is it an alternative to nominatim, or geoserver, or whatnot) then I'd have a better idea about it!
I had a play about with the Blackberry version of Wayfinder a few years ago. It's standard turn-by-turn routing software that ran on a variety of mobile phones. The main difference between it and GPSs such as Garmin / TomTom units is that the data's all held on the back-end server not on the device. I only tested it for driving routing (not walking or cycling; not sure that it supported those). It worked well for me - the on-device software did what it needed to and the back-end server and data (whose at the time I'm not sure) did a better job of routing then some other commercial software I could mention (navigating around the Derbyshire Peak District it neither tried to use only A roads nor roads marked "unsuitable for motors"). The user interface was less whizzy than current commercial offerings but that was a few years ago and might have been improved since. The downsides compared to a 70 quid satnav from Halford's were that it required GPRS coverage for routing and if you were on a limited bandwidth data contract it used some of it.
Looking at the Voda / Wayfinder site it looks like the client side code is split into two - a generic (presumably raw-ish Java) bit and a device specific access layer (on a Blackberry for instance for a consistent UI you'd probably want to do a lot of stuff through RIM's APIs). Re the server bit we've no idea what postprocessing they did on the commercial data that they used to use for routing or if they've used the same TLC on the OSM data that they're now pointing at.
In addition being a potentially "nice use of OSM" it's potentially interesting for another reason - some organisations are reluctant to use 3rd-party map providers because whenever a client wants to display a map they're telling the 3rd party where they are. There are turnkey offerings out there but they can be very expensive; this has the potential not to be.
Cheers, (another) Andy _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
