First day of Skobbling
I’ve never been a satnav type of person. First of all, I like maps too much. I’m also probably conceited enough to figure I can work out a better route than a little black box. And then there’s the number of fools I’ve followed down the A3400, bimbling along at 30mph with the tell-tale little blue glow visible from behind.
Gah. Give me a stash of Landrangers any day.
On Friday I succumbed and bought a 3G iPad. I’d just emerged from a stressful deadline and fancied some unaffordable retail therapy (sorry Mr HSBC. Please be nice to me), and I’ve always wanted an iPhone without the voice contract. And there was the small matter of having dropped my ghastly Huawei 3G modem in the canal which, frankly, is the least it deserved.
Having bought this, I couldn’t really resist Skobbler for the grand price of £1.50ish from the App Store.
Skobbler is a satnav app for the iPhone, and thus by extension, for the iPad in screen-doubling mode. It pulls down vector data and routes from the net, rather than having the geodata storedin memory. And the interesting bit, for me, is that it’s entirely based on OpenStreetMap data.
It’s very good. Rough edges abound, sure, but this is an amazingly nifty piece of code and design. I’d say it’s the fourth great product to spin off OSM. (For the record: OpenCycleMap, mkgmap, CycleStreets.)
The perspective display is the first “wow” moment: fairly standard in modern satnavs but a first for OSM. It pans and rotates beautifully, really making the most of the iPad’s CPU power. (I think the data is being served as vector tiles by CloudMade.)
The GPS accuracy is pretty good, and getting a fix is fast, too. Routes are pulled down quickly and revised when you go off-piste. Voice directions are clear, though the “Beware – watch your speed” gets a bit grating on the M42 with cameras at every gantry, and e A444 should be either the “four four four” or the “treble/triple four”.
The best bit: the OSM data, on the two journeys I tried (Charlbury-Hanborough and Charlbury-Burton), was more than up to the job. There was only one tiny missing street which caused some ambiguity – I’ll come to that later. But even as someone who looks at more OSM data than most, I was amazed how good it was: and the visibility that Skobbler brings to “getting routing right” can only make this better still. (Incidentally, their osmbugs interface is excellent and should be a good example for the main osm.org site to follow.)
What didn’t work?
The place selection UI is uncharacteristically clumsy, with various nested dialogues that didn’t seem too clear to me. It doesn’t appear to support postcodes, either, though no doubt the appearance of OS OpenData will change this.
The routing choices are a bit odd and seem to unnecessarily penalise roads below green-signed A roads. Skobbler tried to take me through Woodstock to Hanborough, which is a bit silly, and through Chipping Norton to Burton, which is odder still. In both cases I blithely sailed on the normal way and it recalculated quickly enough.
It fairly eats battery. Charlbury-Burton swallowed 25% of the charge, even when I put it to sleep on long streches of motorway. But then, most people will be powering it off a 12V adaptor.
Motorway junctions were often announced as “bear right” when they really meant “continue straight on”. Not really a problem. My biggest bugbear is how roundabouts are announced, and this seems to be common across all satnavs rather than being a fault peculiar to Skobbler:
“Take the third exit”
What? Is that this one over here, or was that the second, and does that little service road count, or… sorry, Mr HGV, didn’t mean to swerve across your lane… yes, beep to you too… bang.
“Continue straight on at the roundabout.” Please. It’s much easier. I think you can trust me to steer round the edge rather than ploughing straight through the middle.
Two reasons why this is particularly relevant to Skobbler. The “third exit” approach fails completely with a sometimes incomplete map database. At Wellesbourne it told me to take the second exit; actually, it should have been the third, but OSM was missing the real second exit (a service road to an industrial estate). “Turn right” would have been failsafe.
Secondly, that’s exaggerated still more when the database and the signs don’t agree, as here in Burton where OSM knows one road is the A5189 but the signs don’t tell you that. We should really tag that with ref:signed=no or somesuch, but “Take the second exit for the A5189″ is really, really confusing when there ain’t no sign of no 5189 (poetry).
But in the scheme of things that’s pretty minor. Skobbler is a seriously impressive achievement and one which more people should try… and not just because then I could tag a de facto 7.5T weight limit outside our house.
Incidentally, sorry for the lack of screenshot. I haven’t yet figured how to get WordPress to upload a pic from my iPad photo library. One thing at a time…
Permalink | Comments (8) | Category: blether, cartography |
Saying “turn right” or “continue straight on” at a roundabout fails as soon as the roads aren’t arranged with 90ish degree separations – there are plenty of roundabouts with two “right” turns.
Saying “nth exit” is always completely precise, assuming a complete routing database. Note that even commercial systems like TomTom sometimes get this wrong due to missing service roads…
TomTom also does the “keep right” thing for some motorway junctions (mostly only interchanges with other motorways).
Oh, sure. But that’s true of non-roundabout junctions as well – hence the number of rural junctions with names like Five Ways or Six Lanes End. If giving directions from the passenger seat I’d usually say “the exit at two o’clock” or something, but that may be a bit idiomatic…
Question; did you check that the iPad floats before the purchase?
I get a warm fuzzy feeling about your list of the other “great products”!
For the record, routeable OSM data in perspective mode was being shown off on a Nokia n800 at a CloudMade event in Feb 09 using Navit – see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Navit . So not quite the first – in the opensource world there’s always someone more obscure that you haven’t come across yet.
From a personal point of view, I’d prefer that all the data was stored on the device, rather than relying on over-the-air routes and recalculations. I’m sure the change of being lost increases with the remoteness of the road and lack of phone signal.
When I learned to drive, back in the mid-90s and well before satnav, my driving teacher explained the “nth exit” rules to me, and said that you don’t count service roads or other minor roads; you count roads shown with destinations on the sign. “What do you do then,” I said, “if there’s more than one sign, and the second one has more roads shown with destinations than the first?” He never managed to give me a sensible answer to that.
If OSM-based sat nav takes off I think we’ll see a lot more than just de facto weight limits added. Picture this. It is the first day of the Reading festival. Some joker has downgraded the M4 to a farm track and upgraded some poor sod’s farm track to a motorway. The police predict it will take six hours to clear the tangle of thousands of sat nav sheep.
I think any company intending to go mass market with OSM-based sat nav, needs to take these risks seriously and give some serious thought as to how to minimise the impact of vandalism on their services. OK, the above example might really be fixed by the community within minutes, but I am sure a really determined prankster could be a lot more subtle.
I too used to be deeply sceptical about satnavs, but I’ve realised that they are terribly useful. Sure, I know the area around my house better than they do, and never follow their directions there. Where I need the computer’s help is getting the last few miles from the motorway to my destination in the middle of a town I’ve hardly ever been to before. Sure, I could use a map, but that either means stopping quite often to check it, or trying to read a map while driving. It’s safer and more convenient to have a nice young lady in a box tell me when and where to turn.
I’d love to use an OSM-powered navigation program. However, it has to work offline: you can only assume you have good mobile coverage in towns and along motorways, and 3G roaming internationally is way too expensive. Does Skobbler have any ability to download the mapping data that it needs for the current journey? What I’d really like would be for it to do that in the background once I’ve planned a route, including data for, say, 10 miles either side of the route in case I have to take a detour around an accident or whatever. While in my home country, I’d let it download that stuff over 3G as I set off, when I’m abroad I’d do it over my hotel’s wifi before leaving.
We a need a better pic to go on this page: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IPad Forget screenshots. I want to see a driving-with-ipad action photo, preferably featuring said roundabout. Maybe get a passenger to take it though.