[OSM-talk] Osm2go: mobile mapping with Nokia n800/n810

[Andrew Chadwick (email lists)]

Till Harbaum / Lists wrote:
> 
> i have been working on osm2go, my little mapping application for the
> nokia internet tablets. The latest version has all basic
> functionality required for mapping and i have even been able to map a
> small village with it.
> 
> Nokia N800/N810 users can get a ready-to-run package directly from
> the extras repository.
> 
> See http://www.harbaum.org/till/maemo/index.shtml#osm2go for details
> and download instructions.

Till, hi - this program might well be the Best Thing Ever, for Maemo
users at least; works pretty stably for me under Diablo on an n810, gpsd
and Maemo-Mapper integration included. I'll take it with me At Some
Point and try to do dome serious mapping in the narrow, twisty passages
part of town. This sort of area is a challenge to get any sort of GPS
lock near or in, so a portable editor makes a great deal of sense for
the sorts of inferences and checks needed here.

There's quite a lot of stylus dragging in osm2go right now, both for
panning and for moving objects. It's not always that reliable on my
device (but maybe I'm just unskilled). For touchscreen devices, it might
make sense to offer a button for moving an object (employing the current
yes/no system to finish moving), and to do panning in a similar way to
the way Maemo-Mapper does it, with a single tap *or* tap+drag. Not sure
how well that'd work in places with a lot of areas though.

osm2go should have a mode for following the GPS marker when it wanders
off-screen :) Maybe turned off temporarily while you have something
selected for edit, maybe cancel the select if the user locks the screen
or doesn't do anything to the selected object for a few minutes. Like
the old cup-of-tea test for desktop apps, but more "user has wandered
off to another pub"...

At very high zoom levels, POIs can hide very short ways causing them to
be uneditable. Is it possible to implement a maximum pixel size for POIs
and Way widths? I can supply an example if you need one.

If you're zoomed out beyond the extent of the current project, it's
impossible to pan the map so that part of it is hidden beyond the canvas
edge. This might hinder new users because it creates an artificial
distinction between the behaviour when zoomed in (can pan without
"hitting a wall") and when zoomed out (cannot pan in some or all
directions). I'd suggest drawing a shaded border of about 64px width
around the current project, perhaps looking like JOSM's new "display
boundaries of downloaded data" hatching, and using that as an outer,
visible handle. So it'd be possible to pan to

  +----------+                       +----------+
  |          |                       |          |
  |  Screen  |                       |  Screen  |
  |         #|##########   but not   |          |  ############
  +----------+         #             +----------+  #          #
            #   Map    #                           #   Map    #
            #          #                           #          #
            ############                           ############

The screen real estate usage is generally very well thought out and
makes sense to me. It'd be really cool if the dependency on Hildon,
osso, and various other Maemo-specific parts could be relaxed for users
of devices like Eee PCs, but I guess that's less of an immediate
requirement :)

I wonder if, like gosmore, it would make sense for osm2go to do some
sort of level-of-detail hiding for lower zoom levels, in order to speed
up the drawing process. It might make sense to restrict editability only
to higher zooms too, like potlatch does (IIRC).

-- 
Andrew Chadwick