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

[Alex Barth]

Thanks Richard for taking this away.

What's compelling on iD is the vision of creating an editor that is

- Aiming to be straightforward and easy to learn (doesn't mean dumbed down!)
- Hence more approachable to new comers
- More attuned to maintaining the map than creating a map on a blank canvas
-  Taps into directly into the lessons learned from Potlatch 2 
- Browser based
- JS based
- Modular (make it easy to build other editors with its components)
- Can be developed very iteratively

Really looking forward to pushing on iD Alpha 1. As you noted work's already going on on http://github.com/systemed/iD

On Oct 19, 2012, at 12:58 PM, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemeD.net> wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
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Alex Barth
http://twitter.com/lxbarth
tel (+1) 202 250 3633