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

Chris Hill osm at raggedred.net
Thu Apr 7 11:10:17 BST 2011


On 07/04/11 10:05, Abhi Beckert wrote:
> 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 <http://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.
>
Firstly, thank you for asking *before* using the OSM tiles.

Mapquest provide up-to-date OSM tiles from servers that are more 
powerful than OSM's servers. One of their blogs about it is here 
http://blog.mapquest.com/2011/01/19/open-rollout-continues/

I think they would like advanced warning of an app going live using 
their tiles.

-- 
Cheers, Chris
user: chillly




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