[Openstreetmap] Editor UI - feature requests

[Christian van den Bosch]

Hello again,

I'm starting to get the hang of this editing thing, and I'm wondering if 
the editor UI couldn't be improved a little. Specifically -- could we 
have a new "add a street" tool? As I envisage it, it would operate at a 
higher layer of abstraction than we currently have, combining the 
operations of adding nodes, segments and names, perhaps even re-using 
existing nodes and segments where they happen to coincide with what's 
being added; you would click (not drag) your way down a street, adding 
nodes and segments together, and when you signal you're done (perhaps 
with a right-click?) you get to enter a street name to apply to all the 
segments just entered.

I reckon this would be much easier and more efficient to use than first 
adding all the nodes, then following the trail of nodes to join them 
into segments (doing this by dragging is particularly painful using a 
laptop nipple), then following the trail again to name each segment 
individually (which seems like a lot of wasted typing).

Lesser feature requests:

- an 'insert node into segment' tool - useful for making curves more 
accurate, or joining new streets to existing ones. I've got quite a few 
streets in Cork that should join, but don't :)

- some idea of scale or distance, whether it be for the current window, 
or even the dx,dy in metres, from the last click position to the current 
cursor position.

- undo! For some reason I seem very prone to using the move/adjust tool 
when I mean to add a segment; it takes a fraction of a second to move a 
node out of place, and perhaps a couple of seconds to put it right again.

Christian / cjb

http://www.cjb.ie/