[OSM-dev] Some advice for a new OSM client

[Abhi Beckert]

Hi all,

I'm planning a GPS app for the iPhone, which will use OSM. It's a bit of a
niche app, with some simple features that most GPS users would not want, and
so doesn't exist yet.

I have a basic prototype working, and am convinced everything can be done
fairly easily. Now I need to get some of the specifics sorted out.

My biggest question is, what is the best place to get tiles from? My users
will typically want to download tiles from home, and have them all loaded on
the device like a traditional GPS. There seem to be lots of tile servers out
there, which is the best one? Many of my users will be editing the map, so I
want the data to appear quite quickly after an edit. I noticed a change I
made nearly a week ago is still not rendered at opencyclemap.org, so clearly
some servers have longer delays than others.

Should I run my own server as cache for my users, to help reduce load on the
OSM community servers?

Or even better, is there any open source code to render the raw vector map
data on an iPhone? Or perhaps just some clean C/C++ code for another
platform that I could port? My prototype is using tiles, and it's good
enough. But if it's easy I would like to change what is visible on the map,
since my users have some unique needs in that regard. I also understand the
vector data is smaller/more suitable for storing on the phone.

- Abhi
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