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Comment by glomph | Hacker News Reader

Has any one made a directions engine that runs on OSM in the browser?

There's several:

http://map.project-osrm.org/ http://graphhopper.com/maps/ http://open.mapquest.com/

For mobile, try the Scout app (Android / iOS). Disclaimer: I am on the Scout team. (I also made this 2007-now comparison site.)

http://www.yournavigation.org/

Man, I really like the ideas behind OSM and they have an amazing wealth of data. But someone really needs to fund a team to make a usable website and app suite. I would love to switch over to using OSM, but I've yet to find a website or app that comes even remotely close to the usability of Google Maps.

I'm the author of the engine behind yournavigation.

If you want revolutionary progress, someone needs to "fund a team".

But evolutionary progress has a much smaller price tag: For example contribute to the routing mailing list and fund some hardware.

Cool! I was actually poking around the YOURS wiki. Many of my problems seem to be based around lookup. I found it a little confusing that the YOURS wiki claims to use Namefinder as its indexer, but then the Namefinder wiki page claims it's been obsolete for four years.

Anyway, checking out the actual source would probably clear things up. I might do that when I get home from the office.

Try OsmAnd for Android. Allows you to download maps and use it offline, as well as calculate routes for car, bicycle and pedestrian.

I have and it's awful. I want to just type in the street address of my office in St Paul and have it find the right thing.

Instead I have to type in the full city, state, region, etc. It doesn't know "St Paul" so I have to search for "Saint Paul." It gives me three different results for "Raymond Ave". Two are in the same city, except "Ave" vs "Avenue". None of the three are in St Paul, but my office very much is in St Paul. Which one do I pick? I picked one and it doesn't contain my street address, so I can't pick anything. Now what? I press Back to select another of the three identical street names, but it doesn't remember what I typed so I have to type R-a-y-m all over again.

And that's just trying to find an address. I haven't even gotten to the directions functionality. It's a usability nightmare.

I have and use OsmAnd but I still switch to other maps programs quite often. Just searching for an address is an example of how far the mobile app usability needs to go...

Can you elaborate what you are looking for? I'm exploring OSM development right now, and I'd love to implement something that is missing elsewhere.

Mostly I want it to be smarter. More automatic. I know that's a very hard problem.

As an example, I used YourNavigation.org. I zoomed in on my rough location, containing St Paul and Minneapolis. I typed my office's street address into the side bar thingy, hit enter, and... ended up in California. Whoops.

Okay, type in the city name too, and it found the right place. Great! Now as my destination, I typed in my home address, including the city name. Not found. Dammit, I'm going back to Google Maps. (Actually, I tried 4 or 5 variations. Turned out it wanted "W Streetname Ave", not "Streetname Ave W", even though that's what it says on our street signs.)

Thank you for the detailed reply.

I'm using Locus Pro on Android - I don't think it's using OSM data exclusively, yet I wouldn't go back to Google Maps: the ability to have truly offline, vector maps (not "eh, just cache these few tiles, that should be enough") and track recording are the killer features for me.

http://map.project-osrm.org/

The most professional implementations seem to be:

http://maps.skobbler.com/

http://open.mapquest.com/

The mapquest one is actually useable. Almost as good as google.

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