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

[Tom Chance]

Ahoy,

On Tuesday 05 September 2006 09:51, Tom Carden wrote:
> 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 did preface my email with an apology for whining, and a note that I'm sure 
you and others have worked really hard to get the applet up to the state it's 
in today. It's an impressive piece of work. But I wanted to give my honest 
impressions as a newcomer; myself and several others used it leading up to 
and since the mapping weekend and thought "hmm, that sucks". If I had the 
time & coding skills I might try and do something about it.


> 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.

I'm not so sure. Maybe putting a prominent link to a good page about JOSM 
would be an alternative?

However, the problem with the applet for me is as much its inability (or 
unwillingness) to display OSM data in the view module [1]. Perhaps replacing 
the edit tab with JOSM would help somebody focus on the view module in some 
obscure way?

Regards,
Tom

[1] http://www.openstreetmap.org/index.html?lat=51.445&lon=-0.9685&zoom=11

-- 
The task of critique is not to denounce the ideals, but to show their 
transformation into ideologies, and to challenge the ideology in the 
name of the betrayed ideal (Fromm – Beyond The Chains Of Illusion)