[Openstreetmap] applet 'usability' suggestions

Jo Walsh jo at frot.org
Mon Jun 6 11:23:01 BST 2005


I finally cracked and installed a JRE and then spent a few hours
transfixed by the OSM applet. It's great. I have a short list of
niggling speculation.

- Both the applet the website want me to re-authenticate about every
  10 minutes. This is frustrating. I appreciate that i may have to log
  into both separately. But if i upload a track, then edit the map,
  then go back to upload another track, i'm asked to log in again.
  Is there a real need to have the timeout so high?  

- each time i'd upload a new track, then i'd have to start again at
  the default view on the map and pan around to where i was working
  (not wanting to pan with the applet which is slower)
  
  it would rock if both/either could save state on where you were last
  working.   
  
  it would also rock if at least a link to 'edit the map over the
  tracks you just made' appeared post the GPX upload

- the 'delete segment' button actually seemed to create a segment, at
  least it didn't delete anything. i found i could delete nodes and
  that would delete all the segments attached to them. They don't
  show up in the editor or in the data that i get from the XMLRPC edge.
  but i still see them on the 'view map' at OSM?

- i reckon even a low-quality satellite basemap would be useful in the
  editor, just for context / reference. i found myself occasionally
  dumping and reloading tracks into mapserver w/ landsat to be able to get a
  sense of where i was on the basemap. that central line on the river
  is distracting, is it better to have a shape there?

- i'd like to send editorial questions like that to a forum, like a
  wiki meta discussion keyed to a bounding box, or an ad-hoc mailing
  list of everyone who's registered their focus on a point inside a
  bounding box. 

for the Mumbai Free Map we are looking at a simple hack using
OpenGuides to add a wiki page for each feature and i suppose a little
RDF index to tell mapserver what's annotated. i have heard only the
vaguest things about geoannotation in MediaWiki; no 'solution' yet?


-jo 




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