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

[Lauri Hahne]

On 08/03/2008, bvh <bvh-osm at irule.be> wrote:
> 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.
>

Maybe you should try the python bindings for S60. It's supposed to be
a much more pleasant experience than going directly to Symbian's
borked version of C++.


-- 
Lauri Hahne