[mkgmap-dev] TYP files and oruxmaps

Tue Aug 22 10:57:42 BST 2017

On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 07:32:18AM +0000, Gerd Petermann wrote:
>sorry, no idea. The project oruxmaps seems to be closed source and 
>unmaintained (last release is from Nov 2013).

It is closed source, but I would not claim that it is unmaintained.  
Curiously, the "downloads" page is not listing the Android releases.  
According to http://www.oruxmaps.com/cs/en/more/history the most recent 
release is 7.0.4 from March 2017.

>Besides that I think it is not a good idea to use a rather outaged and 
>undocumented format like the old Garmin img format for a new platform 
>like Android.

I agree.

That said, Oruxmaps can be a reasonable option on an older Android 
device where the open-source OsmAnd would constantly crash due to 
running out of RAM. OruxMaps supports also many sensors, such as bicycle 
cadence sensor and heart rate sensor.

I have some experience from OruxMaps 6.x with Brouter and MapsForge 
maps. (Because MapsForge uses the SD card for caching bitmaps of 
rendered vector map tiles, it is less memory-hungry than OsmAnd, which 
does not implement such caching.)

If only there was an OSM-based open-source Android solution that would 
support address search, good-quality routing (with live recalculation) 
and recording of sensor data, all well integrated into a single program.  
Maybe OsmAnd could evolve to something like that if you accept that it 
would not necessarily run on a device with less than 2MiB RAM.

	Marko