[OSM-talk] State of JOSM

Gervase Markham gerv-gmane at gerv.net
Sun Dec 9 21:49:09 GMT 2007


Frederik Ramm wrote:
> I am sure there are many glitches that we still need to iron out. For
> example I would like to make this whole "modifier key" business more
> configurable.

Adding UI configurability is a double-edged sword. It can be really 
nasty if people ever have to use other people's copies of the software 
(because all the keys are different) but, even if that's not true, it 
makes future expansion difficult.

For example, say you allowed key configuration. Merge is normally M, but 
some guy decides he wants to bind it to G because it's nearer his 
favourite finger (or something). You then add a new function and bind it 
to G; he complains because "I'm already using G".

Better would be to do our best to find a set of defaults which are 
fairly intuitive, and ask everyone to learn them :-)

> So the change is really not that huge if bring just a little bit of
> flexibility to the table, and in a dynamic project like ours we simply
> cannot afford to support "legacy" styles for ever. Changes will be
> made, and will be made to JOSM in the future, that will require people
> to adjust the way they work. 

That's fair enough, but we should attempt to minimise the number of such 
changes by doing a ground-up design taking into account all available 
input at once.

> We're very open to constructive criticism. However our primary aim is
> to make JOSM "absolutely usable" (i.e. usable to people new to JOSM)
> instead of "relatively usable" (i.e. usable to people already
> acquainted with JOSM). 

As I've argued in another message, I think that's a mistake. Although I 
would hope to design a UI which was usable while also being as learnable 
as possible too. The two are not necessarily incompatible :-)

> I am not saying the current way JOSM works is perfect but I am pretty
> sure it is better than the endless mode switching we had before. 

I agree.

> We
> haven't changed a lot since the "modeless" implementation 

Is the current implementation considered modeless? It seems to me that 
it has four modes - zoom, select, add and delete.

Gerv





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