[OSM-talk] The OSM Applet - let's ditch it for JOSM (was: Mapping Reading, some impressions)

[Tom Carden]

On 04/09/06, Tom Chance <tom at acrewoods.net> wrote:
>
> The web applet sucks.
>

Speaking as the person who wrote the initial version of the current
applet, can I just say that the continued trashing of it on this list
is tiresome, offensive, and not constructive.  I accept, as I'm sure
do Steve (who wrote the tiling interface to the applet amongst other
bits) and Imi (who retrofitted tagging into the applet, even though he
didn't like it!), that the way the applet works just isn't viable for
efficient and productive editing.  If we knew then what we know now,
we would have done it differently.  I don't want to hear any more "the
applet sucks" type criticisim.  Everyone agrees it's unusable... and
yet nobody is stepping up to do something about it.

Here's my suggestion:

It seems that for 99% of people actually actively mapping, JOSM is the
main tool of choice (no offense to other editor writers).  How about
we ditch the applet and put a page about JOSM on the edit tab?
Download links, how to navigate to the area you were just viewing, a
full tutorial, etc.  I don't think at the moment it would hurt OSM one
bit if JOSM became an 'official' client and there was no web-based
editing solution.

These are changes that can be written by any one of the extremely
motivated non-coder OSM contributors, and would be far more
productive, and less hurtful, than whining about the applet.

Cheers,

Tom.