Field
What to know when you arrive somewhere new: places around you, the country's essentials, where to go, and where cameras are mapped. Built once online, read offline.
- Home key: f
- Needs: Needs the internet
- Offline: Reads saved dossiers
- Sources: OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia
Places, around a Lisbon fix: what is within 400 m, with a north up plot.
What it is for
Field answers the questions you have in the first twenty minutes somewhere unfamiliar. It assumes you will not have data when you land, so the heart of it is a dossier: one pull of everything about a place, saved on the card and readable with the radio off.
The five pages
Left and Right walk the pages in a ring.
| Page | Shows |
|---|---|
| Places | What is within 400 m, nearest first, with address, hours and phone where OpenStreetMap has them. / filters, Enter opens details and the Wikipedia summary. |
| Brief | The country's emergency number, currency, plug type and driving side, and a summary of the area. |
| Nearby | Four layers, 1 to 5: sanctuary, such as embassies, hospitals and police; egress, such as rail and ferries; comms; and basics like pharmacies and toilets. |
| Watch | A plot of surveillance cameras mapped in OpenStreetMap around you, with rings at 200, 400, 800 and 1200 m, the nearest one's bearing, and which quarter is densest. |
| Signals | Which layers are empty for this place, so a blank page is explained rather than mistaken for a fact. |
Keys on every page
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| g | Locate: estimate your position from the Wi-Fi around you. |
| l | Saved places. Enter goes there and opens its dossier. b builds a dossier without moving your fix. |
| b | Build or rebuild the dossier for the current fix. |
| r | Refresh Places. |
Plan a trip
- At home on Wi-Fi, open Field and press l.
- Add the city you are going to, select it, and press b. Your current fix does not change.
- When you arrive, press l and Enter on the city. Everything reads from the card.
What it will not pretend
- Every dossier states the fix and the day it was built, and reads as stale after 30 days.
- When a layer hits the query's size cap, its count carries a
+, because a cut off count is not a total. - An empty camera map says "none mapped here, which is not the same as none present". Camera mapping is volunteer work and thin in most cities.
- The country brief is a static table of 54 countries. A country not in it says so rather than guessing an emergency number.
- A failed fetch reads "not fetched", never "none within 1200 m".
Not an emergency service
Confirm emergency numbers locally. See disclaimers.