[OSM-dev] Applet hacking?

[Nick Whitelegg]

Not sure what applet usage is like at the moment (I get the impression there 
has been a migration towards JOSM) but if there is call for it, I would like 
to volunteer to do some applet hacking. I'm also working quite a bit on 
Freemap at the moment (and am giving a talk on it at the SoC conference, so 
need to prioritise on that right now) but (particularly in view of my aim to 
try and lower the entry barrier to OSM to walkers) there are a number of 
things I feel I could do with the applet:

These include:

1. Rendering different way types in different colours, as in osmeditor2 and 
Freemap
2. Rendering points of interest as icons, as in osmeditor2. This would require 
an additional 'points of interest' dialog.
3. Convert the "way type" dialog box (the 'easy' one) to use Map Features, not 
the old class scheme

A couple more points from my own 'test driving' of the applet:

4. Allow users to zoom out a bit further. I have just been testing the applet 
on a countryside area where I went walking on Sunday (to get an impression of 
how easy it is to draw a map of a walk) and, while the current 
most-zoomed-out scale is ideal for street editing, it's still a bit too 
zoomed-in to draw a map of a walk. Ideally the outermost zoom level should be 
of the order of 3 miles x 3 miles or something of that scale to make it easy 
to draw walking maps.
5. Way auto-creation mode, which allows a user to create a way in one go from 
the most recently-drawn segments, rather than select each segment.

Worth doing/any comments? Would these steps make the applet too "heavyweight" 
and affect performance - i.e. should it be left as it is and leave the 
"fancy" features to the standalone editors? If there are any other applet 
improvements people have, let me know - though if it's performance, some 
guidance of how it could be improved would be useful.

Nick