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Comment by samcrawford | Hacker News Reader

UI/UX is most definitely not my forte, so I appreciate the kind words!

Your suggestion RE landmarks tallies with an issue I've been grappling with: how does a user actually run with the route that they've just planned? Yes, you can export the route to a GPX file, and some users will use that on watches/apps to guide them, but it's a bit clunky and isn't the kind of thing you'd necessarily do for a short 5km run in a new area.

I'd rather avoid building full run tracking functionality, as it'd just be repeating what so many other apps do (and often very well). Perhaps the answer is to enable easy syncing of the route to your other apps. Strangely, Strava (the most popular) don't allow importing of routes via their API.

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I was think the same thing. The routes generated are really great, but how would I actually use the routes. As some of the routes are pretty complicated. I use an Apple Watch and it would be great to use that.

My preference would be to use Apple Map directions. But it isn’t possible to specify waypoints.

But the official Google Maps URL spec supports specifying waypoints. It would be awesome to click on a link to open the route in Google Maps for turn-by-turn directions.

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/urls/guide#...

Hi Sam, instead of syncing you could hook up the GraphHopper Android navigation demo. Although "app development" is not our focus I really like it to test the routing in real life. And for 2.0 it will be possible to directly have this in the server without a further dependency (see the recent pull request). I've mostly found minor OSM problems in my neighbourhood but also some bugs in GH.

Ah, I see you also have a mobile app. Nice! Is this mainly a mobile version or a native app?

The mobile apps are really just full screen web views, with a few enhancements on top. I will definitely check out the GraphHopper Android project and the recent pull request. An improved native mobile app (possibly even with some offline routing, maybe without some features) would be my ideal endgame.

The Android demo is basically a fork from Mapbox and last year or so they even introduced offline routing (probably via valhalla), but only as a binary blob with a closed source license attached (we forked before so this does not affect us).

btw: are you using CH, LM or plain A* for your setup?

I just had a proper look at GraphHopper Navigation - I can't believe I hadn't seen it before - that looks pretty much perfect for my use case! I will certainly be giving that a try.

I'm using plain A* currently. I understood from the Openrouteservice documentation & code that any time dynamic weights were being used, everything fell back to A* anyway. And I'm using dynamic weights heavily! My understanding could be flawed though, and I appreciate I am going to be a few GraphHopper releases behind now. The speed is okay for now - there's certainly bigger items on my todo list first.

I'm excited to try out GH 1.0 properly. Now that I've got much more familiarity with what I'm doing, I'm keen to switch to using GH directly and somehow try to avoid patching it (or try to get any patches merged back into the open source version).

Garmin have an import API (I’m just setting it up with cycle.travel). I’ve suggested an “open this URL to get a polyline” intent to the Osmand devs and they’ve built it but I’m not convinced it’s live yet.

Thanks for the tip about Osmand, I'll check that out. If you're referring to the Garmin Connect Courses API (https://www.garmin.com/en-GB/blog/garmin-announces-garmin-co...), that's exactly what I've just got access to and plan to integrate with fairly soon...

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