[OSM-talk] Some observations from a newcomer

[Nick Whitelegg]

On Thursday 12 Oct 2006 02:54, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> David Earl wrote:
> > - Sorry to start with a damning criticism, but the viewer on the
> > home page is completely useless. It can leave it 20 minutes
>
> Yes, this is tragic and very well known. Most of us are just too
> lazy 

s/lazy/busy/ :-) I am kind-of "doing something about it" though, but on a 
different tack.

I wrote the rendering part of the viewer but I have to admit I'm not too sure 
*why* it's so slow, when the API is so quick. 

The osmarender mode of osmabrowser, which uses SVG, and the Freemap viewer on 
osmabrowser, similar to the slippy viewer in many ways and which parses the 
API, seem much faster. Maybe it's the environment of tile.openstreetmap.org, 
maybe it's the slippy nature of the map bombarding the database too much, I'm 
not 100% sure. But it does seem evident that given the current setup, it's 
not a suitable thing to go on the home page.

But I think we should perhaps put the slippy viewer to bed for now, while 
alternatives are sought, or revert to the very old version which just showed 
all segments in white and didn't try and do anything with ways. Maybe we 
should offer a "static", non-slippy solution such as those offered by 
multimap.com or streetmap.com. OK Google is cool and Google is slippy, but we 
can always emphasise the free and contributable nature of OSM even if we 
can't offer a slippy map on the main server right now. To this end I'm 
working on the freemap viewer and osmabrowser right now.

That's not to say there isn't a place for slippy maps. Maybe people can set up 
their own localised slippy servers for their own local area, and then have a 
central server which sends people off to the appropriate local server.

Or alternatively,  some variant of OJW's osm at home idea.

Nick