[OSM-talk] New, significantly revised version of osmeditor2

[Nick Whitelegg]

Hello everyone,

Would like to announce a new and significantly revised version of osmeditor2. 
In particular, this new edition is much more orientated towards tagging ways 
at the expense of segments - in fact, it's designed to encourage people to 
create as many ways as possible. I wanted to simplify the user interface and 
options somewhat, and lessen the confusion that could arise between tagged 
segments and tagged ways. To this end, segments that are not part of ways 
(even if they are tagged) show up only as thin grey lines. Labelling is now 
also way-orientated; the names of ways will show up in osmeditor2, but the 
names of segments will not.

GPX trace handling is also improved. In particular, some features present in 
the old osmeditor, but not osmeditor2 have been restored. Firstly, you can 
once again delete sections of GPX trace. A second feature (which has been 
requested a few times here) is that you can now perform a "batch upload" 
where you can select a section of GPX track and construct nodes and segments 
from it in one go. GPX trackpoints become nodes. I have used this myself to 
construct the 10 mile (ish) section of the A31 between Wimborne and Bere 
Regis.

There is now also prototype support for areas. It is limited at the moment; 
you can only create an area, you can't edit or delete them; but these are 
planned features. You create an area using the same method as you create a 
way; the only difference is that you select "area" rather than "way" in the 
way construction dialog box. Note that you can only create three types of 
area ATM, lakes, woods and heaths.

I have also tried to make the whole look and feel much more like a map, 
attempting to make use of osmeditor2 feel much more like you're actually 
drawing a map. For instance, ways with a "highway=primary" tag are now 
rendered in red with black casing like A roads, just like in the 
"dev"/free-map.org.uk.

This will probably now (aside from fixes of bug reports) be the last edition 
of osmeditor2 to use Qt3. I'm aiming to do a wholesale conversion to Qt4 with 
the aim of supporting Windows, and possibly improved rendering using the Qt4 
"Arthur" rendering framework.

Finally, just a bit of feedback for a possible future idea:  at the moment, 
you grab OSM data from the server manually. What would people think of tiled 
retrieval of OSM data as per the applet?

I'll try and put an improved, updated user manual and screenshots on the wiki 
later today.

Nick