Improve desktop application UI / UX

[m-ar-c]

Organicmaps seems to works well on my debian sid box with gnome/wayland 👌.

But to be usable it needs a way better UI/X or some documentation on how to do basic things (which I'd love to contribute to) 📖.

I pushed every button but I cannot figure out how to trigger a route calculation 😖.

I'd like to be a serious user/beta tester of organic maps on the desktop, but right now I can't do the first thing such an app is supposed to do (planning a route).

Great work so far 👍, but let's make the (only FLOSS offline navigation desktop) app usable now 💪 !

[pastk]

Thanks for your feedback!

Historically the desktop app was used for development and testing purposes only, hence the UI is very "technical" and not user-friendly :)

Its a great goal to make it more usable (especially with advent of Linux smartphones) of course!

A lot of work has been done already to make OM desktop launchable on many distros and devices, flatpaks are built regularly etc. - great job done by many contributors and @Ferenc- especially!

Though at the moment I think no-one is working on improving UI. So any help is much appreciated!

If you want to help with testing check e.g. #6429 and follow issues, PRs and fresh flatpak builds in https://github.com/flathub/app.organicmaps.desktop

I pushed every button but I cannot figure out how to trigger a route calculation

Try to hover over the route and position buttons, a tooltip with show up with a description how to do it.

Related to

• Desktop application #4394

[Ferenc-]

I pushed every button but I cannot figure out how to trigger a route calculation

Try to hover over the route and position buttons, a tooltip with show up with a description how to do it.

As @pastk mentioned, you either have to have a location fix or you have to manually select a start point ( "Start point" from the dropdown menu and Shift + Left click on the map).
After that you will need a finish point ("Finish point" and Shift + Left click).
Once that is done, the route calculation is triggered automatically. It might take some time.

[Bugsbane]

My experience was pretty much the same as the original poster. I'm trying on a PinePhone and a PinePhonePro though, so hovering above icons and shift+left clicking isn't really an option (as pointed out in #7121 ).

Are there any plans to replicate the Android / iOS interface for phone style devices (eg mobile Linux)? I'd be happy to test unstable versions on the Pine phones. Also, given that this issue needs to be fixed for the app to be usable on mobile Linux, could the "Linux Phone" tag be applied?

[pastk]

@Bugsbane slowly but steadily things are getting better, e.g. #7505 is a very nice improvement, thanks to the work of @dmfrodrigues and @Ferenc- !