[OSM-talk] The OSM Applet - let's ditch it for JOSM (was: Mapping Reading, some impressions)
Tom Carden
tom at tom-carden.co.uk
Tue Sep 5 10:19:48 BST 2006
On 05/09/06, Tom Chance <tom at acrewoods.net> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
Absolutely. I didn't mean to single you out there, sorry. It's
something we hear regularly, and something we can fix - we already
have good offline editors.
> I'm not so sure. Maybe putting a prominent link to a good page about JOSM
> would be an alternative?
Yes. At the very least the applet page should have links to the other options.
>
> 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?
I don't know what you mean here... the edit tab and the view tab don't
display the same info, that much is clear. They also don't display
everything that it's possible to display (e.g. with osmarender).
Maybe we're not talking about the same things?
The applet is the thing in the edit tab that loads using a Java
plug-in, and is currently almost completely unworkable. It's the
interactive drawing interface on the openstreetmap website.
The view module isn't the same as the applet. The view module (known
here as 'slippy map') is a javascript interface to a web server which
draws small map tiles for us. The map tile server deliberately
doesn't draw things at large scales because there would just be too
much data to draw a "live" picture of. We've discussed rendering the
large scale tiles en masse, or only refreshing the cache once every
few days/weeks, but so far nobody's done it.
Perhaps, for now, the view module could do with a message explaining
that you have to zoom in or search to see things?
Keep the feedback coming, but disclaimers about whining don't excuse
sloppy critique!
Cheers,
Tom.
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