[mkgmap-dev] Feedback: Searchable Addresses (using r991)

Wed Apr 8 16:37:56 BST 2009

As others have commented - congratulations are in order for the guys
who've got *any* of this feature working.
I've got a Streetpilot i3, and some of it works, other bits don't.

If you go to "Where To"/"Address" on the Streetpilot, you first have to
enter a "City Name". It seems that this actually means "Conurbation
Name" since you're not restricted to cities - you can select villages too.

However - if you select "Swansea" as the city (and it is a city), you
next get asked for a house number.You can just enter anything in here
since OSM doesn't (yet) do house numbers. That takes you to the bit
where you select the street, or partially enter the street name.

This is where things start getting odd.

The list of selectable street names consists of all the streets in all
the towns on the map! So presumably, the internal organisation of the
tables isn't quite right yet? I'd have thought I'd only get to see the
streets in the "city" that I'd selected?

Anyway - typically when you select one of these streets (even ones that
*are* in your "city"), the machine reports "Not Found". But I've noticed
that this isn't always the case - if the street is within about 500m of
the "place=city" marker for your city, then the street can be found.

However, I've seen cases where streets that come within even 400m of the
"place=city" marker can't be found, so it may be that the first or last
point in the street's "way" must be within 500m. I've not managed to
find a consistent rule for this yet.

Additionally, I've seen cases where the street-name completion doesn't
work. There's a street in Swansea called "Marlborough Road", but by the
time you've entered "MAR" the machine will report "No Match". However,
the street *can* be found if you enter "MA" then step into the list it
offers and use the scrollwheel to find it. Not sure why that should happen.

Hopefully some of these observations might be useful...
Nice work so far - it's looking promising!
Steve