[josm-dev] JOSM Fail

[Dirk Stöcker]

On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Russell Nelson wrote:

> 1) First (and I realize this is probably a Java / Mac thing), we
> couldn't paste a URL into the URL window.  Fortunately, the
> drag-n-drop code worked (massive hoorays to whomever added that).

There is a bug report and a fix for that. I was unsure but now I believe I 
should really check it in. This fix moves the text from the URL field into 
the text above.

> 4) She selected a way, and then tried to move the node because the
> road had been extended.  Of course, she moved the entire way.  (This
> mnay not be easy to fix).

Good suggestions wellcome. There are perfect valid reasons to move whole 
areas, but probably the common case is that it is unwanted. A solution 
which makes moving everything a bit more complicated without disabling it 
totally would help here I think.

> 5) She went into insert node/way mode with the way still selected, in
> order to extend it.  It ignored her clicks.  This is a usability
> fail.  Never ignore a user's input.  If it can't be used in this
> context, then say why.

You're right. There should be a useful handling of the "there is something 
already selected" case in add mode.

> 5) It *really* bothered her that in insert node/way mode, she had a
> red line from the tail node.  She is resourceful and figured out that
> ESC would terminate the adding.  But that de-selected the way, so she
> had to go into select mode, go back and select it again in order to
> tag it.

Fixing

http://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/1937

would help here a lot to get rid of "Add mode" at all for the beginning 
users.

> 6) "You geeks must really like tedium, because it's wicked boring to
> have to select/delete, select/delete, select/delete, select/delete all
> these inapplicable tags".  I reassured her that we don't like it
> either, but that didn't serve to explain why she couldn't select a
> range of tags to delete them.

Has been fixed. New JOSM allows to press Delete multiple times to delete 
multiple entries. Selecting multiple entries is still not supported, as 
only the delete button would react to a multi-selection and this is bad UI 
as well :-)

> It's my job to help people map.  If I have to fix JOSM to get them to
> map, then that's what I have to do.  But I'm also really NOT
> interested in taking over JOSM development; that's NOT my job.  So
> please tell me how I can contribute to JOSM in a way that helps me
> recruit new mappers, but which is also acceptable to all the currently
> JOSM users.

Send patches. Before doing larger changes asking here about the way to do 
is a good idea. Fixing bugs in the bug tracker is helpful as well. Some of 
the problems you mentioned are already entered there.

Ciao
-- 
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)