[OSM-dev] Feasibility of an 'in the field' mobile editing app?

[bvh]

On Sat, Mar 08, 2008 at 04:38:50PM +0000, Nick Whitelegg wrote:
> Have managed to got hold of a N95 for research purposes through work. One 
> thing that maybe would be useful is an "in the field" editing application 
> for the outdoors, where you walk, the inbuilt GPS on the phone records 
> your track, then you choose a route type (footway, bridleway, road etc) 
> and an appropriate way is created from your track. You repeat this for 
> your whole walk then when you're finished (or even maybe in the field?) 
> you upload the new way to OSM. To avoid the need for (expensive, I should 
> imagine) downloads to the phone, functionality such as checking for 
> duplicate nodes and ways is done server side: if not on the main OSM 
> server, on a proxy server.
> 
> I haven't had a great deal of experience in mobile development though, so 
> do people think this is a feasible project? 

I have a N95 and one of the first things I did was downloading the
SDK to develop such an application. Unfortunatly, I got more than I
bargained for because the S60 platform is not a pleasant one to develop
for...

Now that Nokia has bought Trolltech and has announced that they are going
to port Qt to the S60 range, I personally would rather wait for that.

But on a technical level, there is no reason why such a project would
be unfeasible.

Actually I had sent a mail to the guys that developed Sportstracker
if they wanted to open source their code, but got no answer. If someone
is more lucky than me, that might provide a good basis. It already has
all the functionality to record the track correctly. All it needs is
a small tag editor and an export/upload to OSM functionality.

cu bart