[OSM-talk] N00b experiences

[Andy Robinson]

Good feedback Christoph, and welcome to OSM.

Those of us who have been with the project a while have generally found away
around those areas of poor user interaction and have a fine and fast time
editing map data but your post clearly shows that you have to persevere if
you want to get anywhere quickly. We know from the user statistics that the
project is rather failing the first time user at present.

The embedded applet editing tool is let down by poor response reliability
from one of the platform servers. This means that editing can be a
frustrating experience. Changes planned for the way the whole platform
delivers may improve this in the coming weeks.

The off-line Java application JOSM is what I use and it runs just swell on a
Windows platform for me. Others have problems with it if they are not
running Java 1.5 which I understand may be the case under other operating
systems.

IMO it is by far the most developed tool we have for the OSM editing
interface to date. Most of the static rendered maps you will see on the wiki
would not really be possible without JOSM's ability to quickly manipulate
the map data.

Nick Whiteleg is the author of osmeditor2 and I would suggest you contact
him regarding any hacking on that platform. Nick has also been working on
the rendering side (the view) of the slippy homepage map.

JOSM was created by Imi and he does most of the work on it himself, just
accepting patches when offered, JOSM is not bundled into the OSM svn.

Hope this helps gives some background and hope that you were encouraged
enough to keep trying and offer help where you can.

Cheers

Andy (Blackadder)

Andy Robinson
Andy_J_Robinson at blueyonder.co.uk 

>-----Original Message-----
>From: talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org [mailto:talk-
>bounces at openstreetmap.org] On Behalf Of Christoph Eckert
>Sent: 03 September 2006 10:11 AM
>To: talk at openstreetmap.org
>Subject: [OSM-talk] N00b experiences
>
>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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