[Merkaartor] Some Feature Requests

[Chris Browet]

>
> Hello, I'm new here and I want to say hello to you. I'm from Germany and my
> english is not that good so please ignore the grammar and misspelling as
> long as it isn't too bad ;). Thank you!
>

Welcome!

>
> My first point are the shortcuts. Why ctrl+m? I have to stretch my whole
> hand to hit this combination. My advice is to build in a switch to change
> the keyboard-controls as far as possible to the JOSM style. Is this
> possible?


I agree it's more mnemonic than ergonomic. There will probably be a shortcut
editor in the future.

>
>
> The second thing is the width of the streets. If i want to redraw the Yahoo
> Aerial Photos, I have problems to find the right way, because the Autobahn
> is 15 or 20 pixels width. Here's my advice to build in a small button wich
> allows to scale down the widt of the lines instantly and set it back to the
> original size. It should be like a wireframe mode, but not wireframes but
> only thinner lines.
>

Well, for a first, all the painting is done thru editable styles, so you can
design whatever style with whatever road width you want thru a nice gui in
"Tool-Style-Edit". The built-in "Classic" style (in preferences) might
better suit your need.

Here is a nice style that will give you plain wireframe:

<mapStyle>
</mapStyle>

Put those 2 lines in a .mas file, select it as the custom style in the
preferences and here you go :-)

If you don't feel like fiddling with styles, there is also the opacity
option ("right-click on a layer-opacity") wich can make the road as
transparent as you wish (the "low" and "high" level of transaprency are
customizable in the preferences).

I don't think we need additionals +/- buttons, but if there is popular
demand, why not...

>
> There's an other point: If you set it to load the Yahoo pictures in the
> background, it needs eternities to load all tiles. If you zoom in or out,
> the background switches to white again and it loads everything new.  Would
> you mind to add a feature wich scales the pictures and overwrite it then? A
> blurred image is even better as no image.


Well, it takes eternities because we have to do crazy things (i.e. having to
use a full browser (webkit) to respect Yahoo! terms of use of only using
their javascript API to access tiles. Furtherrmore, we are not allowed to
cache the tiles for reuse.
If you select TMS-Mapnick as a background imagery, you will have an idea of
what the speed would be without the legal requirements.
The reload happens when you zoom to a new Yahoo! zoom level, whether up or
down. I could spend time programming a nice and totally without value
blurred zoom image during loading but, well, ...

>
>
> It's a similar problem if you zoom in too strong. If you do this, the tiles
> will be seperated and there are big white clearances between them. It would
> be better, if the tiles will be zoomed.


This is due to the fact that Yahoo! has different max zoom depending on
region, and there is no way (that I know) to predict it. The artifact you
describe happens precisely when we overzoom on a specific region.
Once again, I could polish the fact some way or another but, well, ...

I think the biggest issue we have now vs. newcomers is the lack of a proper
documentation showing all the possibilities... but we are slowly working on
that (see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Merkaartor_doc_0.12)

- Chris -
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