Map Updates 12. July 2012

After the troubles with sending maps to the GPS with mapsource/basecamp, and also (very rare) reported crashes when searching for addresses on the GPS and my report to the mkgmap Mailinglist of the problem, Steve fixed this today, so as promised I'm pushing through a new round of updates (updated the map data too).

For what I can see the address search works really well now. At least on my Vista HCx. Just some general hints. When searching for an address, simply skip the city and region field and directly enter a number (doesn't matter what number, you can also simply click on okay, as mkgmap not yet inserts numbers into the maps even if they exist in OSM). Then enter the streetname. Now you should already have a list of possible addresses. For popular street names you can then still filter it down by entering a city name. Watch out on the list however, that you get the correct one. For example in Austria Vienna is read in as a region, and not as a city. So you have to enter the correct vieannease district as city (or vienna (well correctly "Wien" as region). Choosing this order it's much often quicker to find the street.

From what I could see, if a street is inside OSM, it can be found now. No more is the problem of one street name existing in several cities problematic anymore. Also Umlauts seem to be more or less correct now (at least for cities that have an Umlaut in their name).

Besides just an overview of some changes to the maps over the last two weeks (as I did not find time to write about them): I removed access=yes from ways, and set a placeholder so that in a very few rare cases obliged restrictions are now set (on not allowed to use a certain street). Streets additionally tagged as service=driveway (and spelling variations) are now handled at a lower priority. Found some strange way of tagging cycleways, and added support for it too (won't document it, as it is incorrect tagging, but can be well identified).

I'm still working on a new system of identifying interesting/tricky points for mtbiking, and will include it soon.