[OSM-talk] N00b experiences

Christoph Eckert ce at christeck.de
Sun Sep 3 10:11:01 BST 2006


Hi all,


I just purchased one of these cool gps gadgets a couple of days before, 
and I wonder how I survived all the past years without having one :) . 
It's a mobile device so I can use it on the bike as well as for car 
routing.
I found openstretmap.org a cool project, so I wanted to contribute some 
streets of my home town. I cruised some systematically to get proper 
tracks. Then I tried to learn more how to convert and upload them as 
streets. That's where the pure fun stopped and the odyssey started :) .

I tried several of the tools provided. First I uploaded my tracks and 
tried the java applet embedded in the browser. This was really lame. 
Often it didn't load completely, so I had less chance to do something 
useful at all. I tried several browsers (Konqueror & Firefox on Linux, 
Safari & Firefox on a Mac and finally IE on Windows) on various 
bandwidths, with no better results.
Thus I downloaded the java tool to my machine, but it didn't start and 
gave me an error message instead. Finally, I managed to do a svn 
checkout of osmeditor and compiled it. Though there were lots of 
warnings, it did compile and it runs, so I was able to upload some 
streets (even that loading tiled maps made it very lame, so I stopped 
using map overlays).

Though it worked, I'd wish some features it doesn't provide yet. As I 
just have read that the openstreetmap user base constantly increases, I 
postulate that one very important requirement for openstreetmap.org is 
the need to improve/simplify the tools to contribute content. Currently 
it seems to be very difficult to new users. Projects like Wikipedia.org 
never wouldn't have been that successful if editing wasn't that simple.

So my main question is: Do you agree that the editing tools need 
improvements? If so: Are there enough hackers who are willing to spend 
some spare time in improving (e.g.) osmeditor2? I for myself are 
willing to help, but my programming skills are rather limited (though I 
can write some Qt4 code). Somehow I'm very glad that there is a tool 
written in Qt4, because this makes it platform independent and I 
personally dislike Java.

Or am I totally wrong and haven't found the right tool yet :) ?

Please note that this is no complaint at all. I just try to convert my 
experiences into something useful.

-- 

Thanks & best regards,

ce





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