Spaced Out ::

I’ve been a long-time user of Mapdroyd, part of my mapping requirement to have offline maps for travel. However since being subsumed by Cloudmade (who seem to be focusing upon in-car navigation) all development has ceased. This is a shame as whilst the interface was a bit clunky, the file format for the maps was very space efficient. This came to a head when upgrading my Nexus 7 to Android Lollipop which broke it - it appears that as it as it tries to start rendering map data on top of the world base map part of the graphical engine fails and it crashes.

So the hunt was on for a replacement….. I have colleagues who use OSMand, however I’ve never really got on with this and think the application is slow and interface horrible. I’ve subsequently come across maps.me which I can only say is delightful to use. The interface is simple and clear, the search good and the maps clear and easy to read, whilst rendering fairly quickly. The maps also seem to be updated with OSM data relatively regularly. And of course, the maps are offline. It also has an intuitive bookmarking system for storing places and can load in KML files as well. There is a routing version, but this isn’t something I have used - it requires different map files which additionally store the routing information.

Two minor complaints;

1. It sends usage statistics back to the publisher - this should be opt-in and a little daft if you are travelling. I installed the Android firewall DroidWall and simply block all outgoing comms.

2. The map files are stored on internal memory. Not very good if you are memory challenged (the UK is 500Mb)!! On my rooted device I use Folder Mount to point all directory requests to a folder on my microSD card.