"free" Navigator 10 by mapfactor.com ... uses OSM data

The whole processing OSM->MCA is still in progress. We plan to integrate house numbers, but this issue is not straightforward. Hopefully it will be available by the beginning of year 2011.

At the moment the update period is approximately 2 months (it is still partially manual process). If you need update of some particular country let us know.

You can use this, but then you have to use computer generated voice: Settings>Application>English:Synthetized English (or Czech Robot). If you use Windows Vista you can get better voice quality by selection of “Windows default voice”.

I suppose you set US units? Do you use yards at all (say 100 yards)?

Thanks
Martin

Ah, but this is for Windows Mobile. Does that mean it’s not possible with most devices? Besides the fact that most WM devices don’t actually include the Speech API, I tried both “Locale Default” and “Synthetized English” and they didn’t work; only MapFactor Lotta worked.
Recently I was looking for a free speech synthesizer for Windows Mobile, and the only one I found (besides FreeTTS which uses Java) was SmartRead Mobile TTS SDK (http://www.smartysoft.com/smmobile/sdk.html) which I downloaded but haven’t actually tried.

Thanks!

Actually now I’m not so sure it’s free.

That’s strange - “Synthetized English” should work for all: PC, PDA and PND (that’s the reason why we did it, so it is not dependent on windows Speech API). Could you send me navigator.log.txt? Can somebody else confirm that behavior? (the latest tested version was 10.1.35)

Hi Martin,

Thanks for this application. I have just installed it (Garmin Nuvifone M10) and will do lots of testing in Canberra, Australia over the next few days.

I’m sure I will have a lot of questions and comments.

Cheers
Nick Hocking

me too, i use the Navigator 10 free to anticipate the reaction of Turn-by-Turn algorythm and take primary mesure to avoid the “turn left” when the road have % of degres and the right instruction is “turn right”.

note: on WM6.5.2 (HTC Touch HD), the “locked” screen (to use the navigator on jacket with my bike)…the navigation process STOP immediatly if i haven’t a starting point.

If i use the GPS coordonates and the final destination, then i lock (press OFF), the navigator don’t help me.
If i does a starting point and the final destination and i “lock”, the navigator work very good.

Hi RGPS, I am not sure what do you mean - some kind of a sleep mode of your device? (I suppose you are not talking about “Settings > GPS > Lock on target”, when the Navigator only shows direction to your destination). The destination is necessary for navigation, but I do not see the need for departure … we will try to reproduce it, thanks Martin

the “lock” mode on HTC (Windows Mobile) is when you push the ON/OFF 1 time to “lock” the screen (touchscreen).
as normal way, the screen is “lock” to avoid touch on pocket … and the screen go in “idle” mode (no display but OS alive to ring/email/SMS).

With the Navigator10, the screen is “only” locked and the screen doesn’t go in “idle” mode.

Question: I don’t have the Japan OSM on list and on the world OSM… ? it’s normal ?

Thanks to Stephan75 for the Mapfactor Wiki page & Martin his Post & Fielding questions.

Martin, do you want questions about Mapfactor use here (for exposure) or is there another site to use?

Thanks

@mapfactor:

For last 3 weeks I have been looking for any map of Martinique. Finally I’ve found OSM and Free Navigator 10. But unfortunately this good looking program doesn’t contain maps for Martinique - yes, where are other islands from this region like Grenada.

Mapfactor: Can you convert Martinique and if possible St. Lucia and St Vincent-Grenadines ?

I will be grateful :slight_smile:

Marcin

Hmm. Now it seems to be working (at least when simulating a route). However, after switching from Lotta to Synthetized (it didn’t ask to restart), the sound effect when you change the volume, and the spoken announcements such as recalculating route, were not heard. Also the Synthetized speech is pretty choppy, and it reads “st.” either as “saint” or as “Ssst” (not sure which), and “ave.” as if it were an unabreviated word.

Another thing. Go to New Jersey, follow the Garden State Parkway, after it crosses the Raritan River. Slightly above the river is a huge maze of exits and ramps and highways. Navigator does not seem to be able to figure out how to get from the GSP onto Route 440 to get to the Outerbridge Crossing into Staten Island, without going in an extremely roundabout way.
On a related note, when you have such situations with highways going in two directions, and more importantly when you have a cluster of crisscrossing roads, it should make this more clear, such as by drawing outlines and arrows.
You can see what I’m talking about at: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=40.52008&lon=-74.29955&zoom=16&layers=M

You are right - Japan is missing in the list of available MCA files. There was a bug in processing (found & fixed today), so I have ver0 of Japan now, but … there are two things to fix (from MapFactor side):

  1. the coast line is not fully integrated in earth_osm.mca, so you would see blue background (sea)
  2. Japan characters are replaced by space (similar problem is in China)

From the OSM point of view I see many towns named “edit_me”.

p.s. I will upload the data so I’ll see what I am writing about …

Hi,

I’ve been using Navigator 10 FREE now for a few days on a Garmn/Asus Nuvifone M10 (Windows Mobile 6.5 professional) and it works really well.

Ok - some comments/wishlists…

I’ve noticed that turn restrictions (no right turn) do not work in my neighbourhood, but I’m not sure if this will be corrected in a subsequent dataset of if maybe the relation is incorrect.

I’d like the program to announce which number road is the next one to turn into, Eg “In 500 metres take the second left into Smith Street”. (or the “next” left as appropriate).

I really like the “clockface” arrow that indicates the angle that the roundabout exit road makes to the current
direction of travel. However I’m one person that doesn’t like to look at the display while driving and (though I’ve never seen it on any sat-nav system), I’d love an option to turn on which would result (for example) in the
announcement…

"In 500 Metres at the roundabout, take the second exit at 2 O’Clock.

Regarding the routing, this program, like nearly all the others tries constantly to get you back to the original route when you take a wrong turn, rather than caculating a best route from your new position. My Garmin 3790T is the only one I’ve seen recaculate the new best route and that really impresses me.

I love the journey track saving option but think it could be improved by

a) allow the entire current journey to be shown on the display,
b) allow old journeys to be also shown (in either the same or different colours)
c) allow the NMEA tracks to be exported to GPX.

I sometimes like to see old tracks so that when I am mapping a whole town/village, I can see which roads I’ve missed.

Do you know if this program will be available unders Windows Phone 7? Does this depend on whether Microsoft make .NET framework available for this. If I can run Navigator 10 FREE and BASIC4PPC on Phone 7 then I’ll upgrade immediately.

The synthasised voice works perfectely although it would be nice to be able to edit the pronunciations.

There were a couple dubious routing announcements but these may be data errors and I will investigate further.

From my own situation, I’d like to see address search use admin level 6 (town/city in my case) rather than 10 (suburb) but maybe there could be an option to select between town search or suburb search.

PS I’d be more than happy to pay for a program with all these features but I do want my free/accurate/up-to-date OSM maps

Cheers
Nick

You should see Martinique on update now. An issue with “St. Lucia” is with ID (one version is st_lucia_osm and another is saint_lucia_osm) - we will verify all IDs (Setup Utility won’t download MCA if ID is different).


update: now both St Lucia as well as St Vincent-Grenadines are available - you will need to update Setup Utility to 10.1.21 and PC/Pocket Navigator to 10.1.37 in order to download and see the data.

@nafg
The crossing is really pretty crazy - could you please give me exact coordinates for departure and destination points so I could easily reproduce it? (or just send me routing_points.xml file)
thanks
Martin

Hi Nick,
thanks for your comments :).

I would need a coordinate of the junction (or better departure and destination coordinates near problematic area). As I wrote at the beginning of this post only simple restrictions are implemented.

You should hear it but only with computer generated voice.

I will fwd this comment, thanks.

:slight_smile: I hear usually the opposite, that it should return to original route instead of recalculating the route. It is recalculating, so if you put departure at given point you should see similar result - I write “similar”, because during navigation it also takes into account your current direction of travel.

These features rather fit in Map Explorer (different product) which is used for vehicle tracking, reports, etc.

No (as far as I know).

Can you be more specific? What country? We still discuss it on German forum (about Germany), so this part needs still some “tuning”.

Thanks :). At the end we still need some paying customers :wink:

not a problem for me…but some “condition” to pay the product :

  • update in realtime from OSM (download some specific area if you must use a preprocessor stage) and use immediatly. I don’t want to wait 2 month to view and use my correction on OSM.

  • low price (like 10 Euros or donator free profil like noniGPSplot for example)

Thanks for the reply Martin,

The turn restriction that doesn’t appear to work is…

No Right Turn
From -35.3446511, 149.2185807 (Uriarra Road)
Via -35.3446643, 149.2183460
To -35.3431870, 149.2186082 (McKeahnie Street)

The town/suburb issue can be seen at

Australia, New South Wales, Queanbeyan ( -35.3835340, 149.3067630 )
Admin Level 6 - City of Queanbeyan
Admin level 10 - Suburbs of Queanbeyan (e.g. Greenleigh)

Since I don’t like to take my eyes off the road while driving, I like the sat-nav to be very chatty. Here’s an example…

Driving north on 7th Street. The second road on the left is Main Street. Then I want to drive down Main Street and turn left into 2nd Street.

Navigator 10:

Carry on straight ahead
.
In 200 Metres turn left into Main Street
.
Turn left
.
Carry on straight ahead
.
900 metres from destination
.
Carry on straight ahead
.
Carry on straight ahead
.
500 Metres from destination
.
Carry on straight ahead
.
Carry on straight ahead
.
In 200 Metres turn left into 2nd Street
.
Turn Left
.
Arrive at Destination


My ideal Chatty Mode would announce something like

IN 300 Metres take second left into Main Street
.
In 200 Metres take next left into Main Street
.
Turn Left
.
In 1 Kilometre takes 5th left into 2nd Street
.
In 800 Metres take 4th left into 2nd Street
.
In 500 Metres take 2nd left into 2nd Street
.
In 200 Metres take next left into 2nd Street
.
Turn Left into 2nd street
.
Turn Left
.
Arrive at destination in 60 Metres

Arrived at destination.

You are right :(. I looked at http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/37693, that it is not “right turn” but “left turn”, but … there is a small portion of Uriarra Road, so from relation point of view it is like T-junction, and I have to check left/right. It should be working when both ways ends in “node via”. Am I right that there is no solution when “node via” is for both ways somewhere in the middle?! (it is not this case)