[OSM-dev] iD update - building a JavaScript editor for OSM

[Richard Fairhurst]

Hi all,

At State of the Map US I gave a talk on OSM editors and subsequently 
spent a lot of time chewing the fat with the MapBox guys about the future.

The full talk is at http://www.systemeD.net/blog/index.php?post=24 but 
to save you the full tl;dr experience - pretty clearly Flash is on the 
way out in the browser, and we need to have a JavaScript-based solution 
available. This also gives the opportunity to rework the UI, rather than 
doing a straight-across port, now that OSM has an ever-increasing 
profile and the chance to appeal to less technically minded contributors.

So, a couple of months ago I started on a JavaScript port of the 
Potlatch 2 internals, called iD. Happily, this coincides with MapBox 
winning the Knight Foundation grant to work on tools and projects around 
OSM; it seemed sensible to talk. (Probably less sensible for me to have 
quite so much American cider while doing so. Yeeouch, that stuff is strong.)

We're therefore planning to:

- build the core as a pure-JavaScript OSM-editing library, effectively 
reusing the internals of P2, so it can be a common base for future 
targeted editors;

- and to build iD as the first editor on top of that, aiming for ease of 
use but (like P2) the ability to work with any OSM data that exists.

We think we can get an alpha version of the editor ready by the end of 
the year - a real working editor but without bells and whistles. (We're 
sketching a list at https://github.com/systemed/iD/wiki/Alpha-1 .)

So - come and join in. The code and issues are at 
https://github.com/systemed/iD . It's in a state of flux right now; 
expect it to change rapidly as issues get nailed down.

We'll be talking every Monday on IRC: #osm-dev (on irc.oftc.net as 
usual), 5pm UTC, beginning on Oct 22nd. Or you can ping me (RichardF) or 
Tom MacWright (tmcw) any time we're around.

Really looking forward to the first created_by=iD in the database. Come 
and make it happen. :)

cheers
Richard