I spent several hours looking for simple solution and still haven't found one.
MapBox style editor uses this simple feature. That you can hover and click over map, and it shows small popup stating all terrain classes you enabled in your map.
Question, how to do it in Android version of MapBox given I have installed my style. Now I want click on any place in the map and get the same popup stating, for example, that this is building, woods, background here. Or other place would satte, that this is major road.
This IS doable as MapBox studio itself shows. i can't believe it uses some API not available for anyone, as this is one API no map provider gives, while still able correctly draw terrain. What so complex to add this API?
And NO I am not interested in address. I am interested exactly on terrain, for simple task - distinguiosh water from non-water, road from non-road, building, from non-building, don't care where it is by address, so reverse geolocation does not work. Or simpler - I need SIMPLER geolocation, than address.
Your questions kind of confusing but I'll try and help. If I'm reading correctly, you are trying to create an Android app that uses an API similar to Mapbox Studio that allows the user to select/distinguish the difference between objects on the map such as buildings, water, forest, etc.
If this is the case, then first you must understand that Mapbox Studio is using OpenStreetMap data to distinguish between objects. These objects are stored in a database with tags. It's tough to explain so i'll just leave a brief reading wiki page that might help.
To my knowledge, there isn't any API's specific to Android that will give you the kind of information you're looking for. However, if I was in your dilemma I'd take a look at the Overpass API as it's a complex query tool that allows you to send coordinates to it and it will return all the tags (such as building or water) at that location within a JSON object. From there you can parse and use the data in your app. It is very powerful so I suggest reading up on how to use it and test using a website called Overpass Turbo, that's if you decide to use it.
Nevertheless, I hope this helps and I understood your question correctly.
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I wish to make an android app that leverages OSM services and runs an algorithm of my choice to find the route, say A* or some heuristic on Dijkstra.
The Routing wiki page of OSM has some good pointers but it does not give any insight about how to go about implementing your own algorithm in the app.
This response is overview which might help you to orient better in the landscape and find a way to approach the problem. Your question is too broad to give an exact simple answer but I do understand why are you asking such question.
You can use Osmdroid library to display the route you have on Android.
Keep in mind that the core feature of Osmdroid is to display the map tiles. Map tiles are just bitmaps so you need either an online source of tiles or an offline one. How to do that is covered in the documentation and partly in other questions on SO. It's a too big topic to explain it here in detail. Just to make it clear: .osm file with raw OpenstreetMap data cannot be directly rendered by Osmdroid. Map tiles are usually rendered from that data in quite complex way and not on the fly.
Another very important feature in Osmdroid library is the ability to display so called Overlays. E.g. Markers, polygons etc. You may use those to draw your route on the map and other features you may wish to display. This is again covered in the documentation and too big to go in details here.
There is a support for routing for Osmdroid (AFAIK in Osmbonuspack) but that's about using some 3rd party service to get your routing data and displaying that. According to your comment you want to implement your own algorithm and therefore this would be no use to you.
So the last part is how to integrate your algorithm into that. That's not a simple question with a simple answer. You'll need to do almost everything on your own, starting with getting the data you need to run the algorithm from the OpenstreetMap database (.osm file). I don't think there's an API which would provide you reasonable way to access the data in a form suitable for route computation. The approach I would choose is to develop some kind of preprocessing which would take either .osm file or a database with the data an produce my own structure representing the graph for navigation. I would than include this graph in my application and run my algorithm on that data. The output of my algorithm would be the route: a list of coordinates which I would use to draw the polyline.
If the area you need to cover is small enough, you may start with including the .osm file in your project and running the algorithm in the same was as you do now. Maybe it's going to be good enough for your situation.
One interesting project to look at to find inspiration is Graphopper - they have build exactly what I said above and they use it to provide a library for Android/iOs and a web API. But the core is the same - pre-process OSM data into graph data and run the algorithm on that. Since you wish to implement the algorithm on your own this library will not help you (unless you fork the project and modify it) but it might be a valuable learning resource.
I'm using Here Android SDK and trying to customize my map. I follow the example at enter link description here. But for some CustomizableVariables I can't assign color because I don't understand what exactly such parameter means. For example at mapbox has mapbox studio - it really simplifies the process of custom scheme creation. Is there anything like that for here maps?
It would be very useful at least be able to find specific areas on the real map, to decide what color or size to assign.
Maybe there is some way I can move the map to the area with specific CustomizableVariables? Or is there any docs, explaining what all such parameters means?
There is no high level user interface to mange map customization for Here Android SDK. The customization is based on using the available CustomizableVariables. For many of them, the naming is self explanatory. Otherwise it is a hit and trial approach to see how the variables affect the visuals of the map.
I would like to create a navigation application, with mapquest sdk for android, that gives real time turn by turn directions using GPS after a route is created, like when you start a navigation on google maps on button press. Is it possible to implement the feature using just the mapquest sdk or would I require any other api.
Say if there was a possibility, then, is there a way to extract that guidance('turn left/right') cue and use it with in the program?
Yes, it is possible. I'm currently developing my Bachelor Thesis (a mobile navigation service) with the MapQuest API for Android. So as soon as I submitted it I can offer you the source code, too (will be in about a month). However, I can give you some help of course though.
Here is a nice tutorial from MapQuest of how to implement the route functionality. This is not a real time turn by turn guidance but gives you a first impression where to begin!
You can get all instructions from MapQuest here.
If you prefer another API to display the map this is not a problem as the guidance includes all shape points of the route. I chose the MapQuest API for this though as it is a bit easier to display the map for a first glance. However, I recommend you to draw the route yourself on the map though because the implemented method does not always work properly.
Hope I could help you with that and if you are willing to wait a month, I will post here the link to my GitHub repository with the source code.
Best,
Marius
EDIT:
So I submitted my work and can now give you access to my source code. You find my GitHub repository here.
I think the function getGuidance() in the NaviActivity will be a good starting point for your application. It calls the guidance information from MapQuest and converts the information into a JSONObject. The Route class then grabs the required information and sorts them in arrays.
I hope that this will help you with your application. For further questions do not hesitate to ask :)
Best,
Marius
After plenty of searching, I haven't yet found a solution that works for me and I'm really hoping someone here could help me. First I'll explain my problem, and then I'll mention some of the approaches I've attempted/considered so far.
Basically, I'm developing an Android app where markers randomly appear around the user's location. The catch is, the markers need to be placed on streets only.
I've been working with Google Maps Android API V2 but I'm trying to work around using anything with "limitations" such as 'geocoding'.
I've considered using different map API's such as Nutiteq but I've had some trouble implementing them. It would be nice to stick to Google since I've become familiar with it but I'm willing to try any suggestions you may have.
I have even considered loading up Google Maps API V3 in an html file so that I can use GDirections to load a path from one point to itself and then parse this data to Google Maps Android API V2 using JS but turns out GDirections has a limit as well.
Anyone have any idea how I can go about doing this? Even if the solution is hacky, it's still something.
I'm fairly new to Android Development.
Funny what you want to achieve. You don't need to load API V3 html. You can use directions api directly: http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/directions/json?origin=51,19&destination=51,19&sensor=false
It still has limitations, but is was like 2000 or something a day a device. And you don't want to put more than 2000 markers on single user's screen, do you?
This is easy to parse, for example with Gson.
I need a Map API for Android that can provide me with indexed nodes and indices that make up the road network. The main idea is to determine if two GPS devices are on the same road. Thank you in advance
A Map API by itself will not have that information. Anyway, you can get it from OpenStreetMap freely. You can download it from here.
I don't understand from your question if you intend on displaying the results on a map. If so, and you want a nice and free map API, I would suggest Leaflet. It's not as mature as the likes of OpenLayers but, as you've tagged this post with "android", Leaflet just kicks ass in the mobile department.
OpenStreetMap is definitely a good source of data for this kind of project. Unlike google maps, it gives developers access to the underlying vector data of a map (fully open). This allows interesting new use cases which simply are not possible with google maps, and something involving geometric calculations like this would definitely fit into that category. You either need OpenStreetMap or some other source of "vector" map data, and beyond OpenStreetMap this can be expensive.
Unfortunately that's not the full answer to your question. You still have a lot of work to do to use the data in the way you intend. You need to calculate the proximity of two points (GPS readings from two devices?) to nearby roads, and figure out which road the point lies closest to. It's the kind of powerful geo calculation you might do using a GIS package such as QGIS or a functions of a geo-aware database system PostGIS.
But that's not the answer to your question, because you need to do these calculations on device. I'm not aware of an off-the-shelf library to do this on android. I think you would have to roll your own.
But another challenge is to get the vector data onto the device in a suitable format in the first place, and this is the first thing to solve. You'd want the vector data either as a large download for a whole country, or perhaps a smaller area, perhaps with an on-the-fly download feature within this app. Whole countries are not infeasible when working with maps in vector form (ever tried the awesome MayDroyd app?), but require some compact formatting. Happily some of these problems are starting to be solved in open source off-the-shelf libraries. You could try to build on top of MapsForge for example.
So then you're back to the challenge of writing on-device code to poke around in this data and do the calculations you want to do. I suppose it could be rather good if projects like MapsForge included generic PostGIS style geo-functions to make this easier. Something to ask the mapsforge developers about perhaps.