[OSM-talk] osmeditor2 and JOSM

[Robert Hart]

Nick,

I'm kind of glad you have come forward with this proposal. I really liked
osmeditor2, particularly it's conveniences for creating a way in one go,
without having to do nodes and segments first, and in tagging ways without
having to manually add many tags. However, I ended up using JOSM for almost
all of my editing for two reasons I think. Firstly it seemed more stable,
and less dependent on the server stability, and secondly it could display my
photos over the map and hence let me tag street names and features easily.
This gave me the dilemma of where to focus my coding time. On the one hand I
wanted to make JOSM better, because that is what I use, and on the other
hand I'd like to fix up osmeditor2 because that is what I'd like to use.

What is clear, is that with web-sites, editors, renderers, and so forth,
there isn't enough developer time for duplication of work for little or no
reason. I agree 100% with your list of features lacking in JOSM, and I was
already planning on improving the JOSM tagger to make tagging of well
established feature fool-proof, simple, and noob-friendly, and figured that
was low-hanging enough fruit to suit my non-existent java knowledge.

As for the GNU classpath issue, I am not even vaguely close to understanding
how much a task that would be... it is certainly my biggest issue with JOSM,
but perhaps it might be simpler just to wait for classpath to catch up? I
know they are making tremendous progress. It's also possible Sun may get a
clue about open source.


Rob




________________________________________
From: talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org [mailto:talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org]
On Behalf Of Nick Whitelegg
Sent: 08 September 2006 12:25
To: talk at openstreetmap.org
Subject: [OSM-talk] osmeditor2 and JOSM

The most recent editor discussion, together with the need to try and spend
my (increasingly restricted as the autumn goes on) development time most
productively, has got me thinking about one or two things. 

I'm now thinking that given that JOSM is already a well developed editor,
I'm now coming to the conclusion that it might be better all round for me to
add those features which keep me personally using osmeditor2 to JOSM, so
that everyone can benefit from those features.

The sort of features I would like to add to JOSM if I were to switch are the
following:

- direct communication with GPS, removing the need for GPSBabel. 
There is apparently an open-source (LGPL) JAR for serial GPS communication
(see http://www.tegmento.org/gpsylon/#gpstool)
 making this feasible.

- remove the need for people to know about Map Features, with a drop-down
selectable list as in osmeditor2.

- an optional display style where ways are rendered in different colours
according to type, as in the slippy renderer, osmarender, Freemap or
osmeditor2.

- show POIs as icons (as per the slippy renderer, osmarender, Freemap,
osmeditor2)

- Landsat, particularly for estimating areas.

- SRTM contours, for estimating features (eg. hills) on private land.

Not sure what the feeling amongst existing JOSM users, and particularly Imi,
is for such features - but if people are happy for me to add said features
to JOSM, I'll do so. Any UI design/usability ideas would be very useful, as
I think others are stronger in this area than I am.

We could then offer a fairly straight choice of editors for users, Potlatch
or JOSM, which should cover most needs.

Given the quite large number of users who want to use a 100% Open Source
environment, it would also be of benefit to make it compatible with GNU
Classpath or other open source Java VM.

Thoughts?

Nick
  
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