Provide autocomplete list for street names/destinations

[Aaron Whitehouse]

When I search for a street in OSN, I have to type it out in full and then hit "search". This is very slow on an onscreen keyboard.

When I search for a street in Google Maps, Wises.co.nz or most others (OSM being an obvious exception), it suggests the most likely results for those characters in an ever-narrowing list below the text box. When your search rises to the top, you can just click it.

It seems strange to me that on a computer, where I can easily type full words, I rarely have to, whereas on the Android, where it is much more difficult, I have to type the full street name (and often ", [area]").

It would be great if OSN could auto-suggest results as one was typing in the street name or destination, sorted from nearest to furtherest.

Personally, I would only need NZ street names at the moment. Presumably this would be easier to do once tile packs are supported (Bug #579448)?

[Murphy (murphy2712+launchpad)]

There's already an autocomplete feature in development that will propose you addresses that you already entered.

I understand that this would be great to have a live suggestion box in a phone but it consumes a lot of network resources and that's why only desktop computers have it.

Tile packs only contains... tiles!
That's just bitmaps and there will be no text data inside these packs.
It's not possible right now to provide a full auto-suggest nor offline navigation because we don't use vector data.
It is in our plan to support it in the future but that's a lot of work so it will not be very soon.

[Aaron Whitehouse (aaron-whitehouse)]

Thanks a lot. That makes sense.

As a stop-gap, would it be possible to download, say, all New Zealand street names(/co-ordinates?) and use this for auto-suggestion? I don't have any idea, but I would have expected a list of streets would be comparably small (if downloaded via WiFi). If the correct name isn't autosuggested (say because it is in another country not in the list), the user can always click search as they do now.

Does a feature like this belong in OSN or osmdroid?

[Murphy (murphy2712+launchpad)]

That's doable in a reasonable amount of time.

Say we could select a dictionary in the preferences,
and it contains all the street names in a country,
in order to help the autocomplete search's input.

We still have to find all these names from an external service (openstreetmap xAPI?) and sort them by country.

This feature will only be possible when the basic autocomplete issue (Bug #579381) is done.