Sometimes there are situations when connecting to the Internet to download map and find your whereabouts is impossible or at least undesirable. You maybe be traveling abroad where roaming prices are pretty expensive. Or you may find yourself in an area with no coverage at all. In this case GPS in your phone becomes almost useless.
RMaps is a navigational tool that will help you to get around this situation. You can use it as online viewer for some popular map providers (like Google Maps, Microsoft Maps, OpenStreetMaps or Russian Yandex) or create your own “cached” maps on PC and upload them to your phone for offline usage.
| Summary: RMaps is the navigation tool for operation with popular on-line and off-line maps | ||
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Application: | RMaps |
| Developer: | Robert Developer | |
| Current version: | 0.8.7 | |
| Price: | Free! | |
| Android version supported: | 1.5 and up | |
Current version (0.8.7) of RMaps supports the following features:
- Auto rotate map in driving direction.
- Auto rotate map in the northern direction.
- Compass on the map.
- Auto-follow function.
- Online search.
- Full screen mode.
- GPS and wireless network mode.
- Indicator accuracy like on Google map.
- Import and export tracks from/to GPX, KML file.
- POI functionality, import POI from KML, GPX files.
- Installation to SD card.
How to create offline map for RMaps
Step 0. To create offline map you will need to download free open source Mobile Atlas Creator (MOBAC) tool with SQLite library. MOBAC is written in Java and requires Java Runtime Environment to be installed on your computer. You can download it for free from Oracle website.
Step 1. Run Mobile Atlas Creator and from the drop-down box in the left upper corner of the screen select map provider (OpenStreetMaps, Google, Microsoft etc.)
Step 2. select desired area of the map with mouse. Use mouse wheel to zoom in and out, right mouse button to scroll the map and left mouse button to select region.
Step 3. Choose zoom levels for you offline map. For Google maps levels 0-19 are available, where 0 is the entire world and 19 zoom down to individual houses. Please note that creating maps of a large area with high resolution will result creating data file several gigabytes in size.
Step 4. Enter the name of your map and click “Add selection” button. Note that you can create maps of several different areas within one file. If you want to add additional areas repeat steps 2-3.
Step 5. Select RMaps.SQLite format from “Atlas settings” drop-box.
Step 6. Press “Create atlas” button. Progress window will appear and maps downloading process will begin.
Step 7. Once completed, open the folder with your atlas file. You can rename the file if you like, but be sure to keep .sqlite extension. Copy the file on your Android device to /sdcard/rmaps/maps folder.
Step 8. On your phone start RMaps. Press Menu button and go to More > Settings > User defined maps. Select you map from the list and it will become active. That’s all!
Author of the RMaps created video tutorial on how to create offline maps with Mobile Atlas Creator:
Hi,
I did everything as tutorial showed, but on rmaps nothing happened, there is still loading icon. Do you know what could possibly be the problem?
Cheers buddy
Probably your map is centered at the point, for which you do not have cached map. You can try to zoom out the map to the levels around 1-5 and scroll the map to find cached region manually.
Mobile Atlas Creator:
Can’t find Google Maps in the “Map Source” drop-down box.
Has it gone ?
Thanks
By default Mobile Atlas Creator starts with ‘OpenStreetMap Mapnik’ selected as map source. Scroll up the listbox to select Google or Yahoo maps.
130220
Hi,
is it possible to show a loaded .GPX (route or track) in the
offline-map ?
So I could follow it when walking along.
Thanks !
Yes, there are options to create tracks, import and export them into GPX or KML formats. To manage tracks open application menu and select “More”, then “Tracks”.