Java Mobile Phone navigation system development - looking for testers

Yes the nokia 6110 does come with Benelux on it by Route 66.
Regretfully I have to pay 119,- EUR just to get the west european maps which include germany.
So I’m looking for an alternative.

Is there anyway the maps can be generated by myself from openstreetmap, based on your symbian application?

Sorry, but no, you can’t generate the maps yourself - yet. Map of Germany might be available in the next couple of days - check out the site !

Map of Germany (and some other new countries) available for testing now at we-travel.co.cc
Please bear in mind that those new maps have not yet been tested at all !

Sweden/Scandinavia isn’t available… And it would be really great to have the converter software even if it’s hard to use…

I want to use this app to be able to check what has already been mapped in my area, and what I need to add, doing this without GPS means I really would like to be able to move around zoom in and out more easily…

But good work with the app it really does fill a segment that is interesting and usefull.

Ok, I’ll see what I can do to publish the scripts. The procedure would probably look like:

  • Download .osm file
  • import in MySQL with Osmosis
  • run We-Travel map creator application
  • Install the resulting .jar

Should probably not be too hard for most people on this forum.:slight_smile:
I have some other more urgent things to do first, but hope I can publish something towards end of next week.

No rush… :slight_smile: Just having it available it usefull.

Is the Map Data bundled with the JAR file? Could I please request Map of Philippines and Map of British Columbia, Canada?

Thanks

I can test BC Canada for you. I have Nokia N80 with QStarz BT-816, it works with GPSMid but your App with Voice Navigation sounds nice. Also, instructions for user to make their own maps via OSM data, e.g., from CloudMade [like how GPSMid is made] will be wonderful.

How big are the JAR files?

The map data is indeed bundled with the jar file. The jar files range from 2MB for small maps to 80 MB for a country like Germany (the largest so far). They are roughly in the same order of magnitude as the zipped CloudMade download file.
I started working on a map for philippines, though things are moving a bit slower for the moment as I’m experimenting with utf8 - unicode for the maps at the same time. If you supply me a bounding box for British Columbia I can make that one too.
Looking into user map creation as well.

I’ll do a map for :

region.1.lat.min = 48.414618
region.1.lat.max = 60.009970
region.1.lon.min = -113.950195
region.1.lon.max = -139.108886

Hi,
I live in Thailand, northern city of Chiang Mai. If you provide that area map for download, I would be very happy to test with my Benq-Siemens S88 here.

Hi,
Cannot install WETRAVEL on my Benq S88. It says always “size too large”. Other applications I can install easily as I have a 1GBmemory.
WHY WETRAVEL cannot?
Pls help.
Regards.

Hi there, I just took a look at your site and something kinda struck me: Your window title is

while there already is VGPS available for years. To me it looks like We-Travel and VGPS are doing nearly exactly the same thing. Can you elaborate on why you decided to create your own mobile navigation system and what the differences are between VGPS and We-Travel?

Good Question

We-Travel and VGPS are indeed similar.
A couple of reasons why I started We-Travel:

  • first of all, I started doing it for the fun and the challenge, mainly the challenge to create a cross country street to street routing engine fitting in a java mobile environmnet
  • VGPS is not truly in free as there is a 20$ ‘service charge’ to generate a map, even after you go through a lenghty preparation cycle yourself. The freely downloadable maps are labeled as ‘demo’ versions. (as an after thought, I had 7000 downloads over just the last 2 days, maybe the 20$ wouldn’t have been a bad idea at all)
  • largest maps in VGPS have currently ± 100 000 streets according to the site, VGPS positions itself as a city navigator, where with We-Travel I want to offer country level navigation (eg the We-Travel Netherlands map has 1.2 million streets)
  • Nobody seems to understand the VGPS GUI (though that’s probably the same for We-Travel) and to my personal taste the maps are just plain ugly (but then again, we-travel faces similar problems to some people) ) - respect to however made them, it’s quite an achievement in itself.
  • At the time I started We-Travel development (feb 2008), there was no routing in VGPS. Voice navigation in VGPS is even more recently (May 2008)
  • VGPS gave me a very ‘closed’ impression when I looked at it : not a single post in the forum, where I want to move much more to a collaborative community way of working, no outreach whatsoever on the site.

And about my window title : you might have noticed it is strikingly similar to the VGPS title ("VGPS is The World`s First and Only GPS application runs on any cell phone that can install java J2ME application. "). I had to add the more restrictive ‘totally free’ and ‘country level’ to maintain a first off claim, but as such the title is actually meant as a tribute to VGPS for insiders.

Probably an ever better question is why I didn’t join the GPSmid truly open initiative, the other similar product (and with a really beautifull userinterface)

  • Around the time I started, there hadn’t been a GPSmid release in 4 months, so I wrongly assessed it was nearly dead
  • I had the feeling the routing attempts at that point where going nowhere and where fundamentally flawned, discussions were just too slow
  • I looked at it for a while, but couldn’t understand how to build the app or how to make a map. Guess that scare me away. It all just didn’t look ‘friendly’ enough

Hope this clarifies things a bit ?

I guess the Benq S88 has a jar-size limit ? I’m investigating the possibilities for a file based version to get around this problem

Thanks for the explanation, I didn’t look at VGPS closely enough to see it needed money for their maps. My bad. Although VGPS isn’t active on the forum I do seem to remember seeing some things come by either through the mailinglists or wiki.

BTW I hope you don’t mind that I mirrored the Dutch release when your site went down because of publication on Tweakers.net and Nu.nl. At the moment it has clocked around 230 downloads from http://www.openstreetmap.nl

Some operators disable file access profile that Java has, but many don’t so it will work. But if you need testing I can try to find out what the Exception is from a phone that lacks this… E.g. the operator “3” which I think is paneuropean.

After a long quest I found a way to have we-travel running on my alderly PDA with Windows PocketPC 2003:

You need a Java Virtual Machine on a PDA. The only one that works for now is phoneME (http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~davy/phoneme/)

I had to choose the version phoneME Feature - MIDP rev15383 → save cab-file to storage card → install

Then choose the app under /phoneme/midp/bin/arm/runmidlet → Install application → Menu → Storage → and then type in the path to wetravel.jar on the storage card (why is there no dialog to choose a jar-file ??)

Can anyone confirm this step-by-step way?

Pending tasks are connecting the GPS-Device to the Java VM, and importing the map for Germany.

Any further hints or questions? Greets, Stephan

This is a really good project. It’s very useful specially when travelling.

First I Appreciate for ur project, i am living in UAE (United Arab Emirates) and i got a uploaded map and atlas for uae, but unfortunately the quality of Maps is not good. i cant see most of the places and cant load map if i am zooming. Can u please generate for me, latest and quality maps and atlas (with maximum zoom level) for uae. if u will do that, it will very helpful for me, please…

i will wait ur reply

thank u

Hi all, bit of random late posting. Is there anyone still having the app and the offline maps? Thank you. :slight_smile: