[OSM-talk] [OSM-dev] OSM front page design concept

SteveC steve at asklater.com
Sun Feb 21 19:55:42 GMT 2010


On Feb 21, 2010, at 11:49 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 16:36, SteveC <steve at asklater.com> wrote:
>>>> ... It's very clear that nobody can convince Richard to actually write something any muggle would really want to use, you can scream at him to finish the mythical Potlatch 2 all you want, but he doesn't give a shit and lives on a boat in bliss. That's his choice, and it's totally fine, but if we all feel that way then we have to deal with the downside that every single day we lose tens of thousands of edits because of that monopoly on bad UI. All I'm suggesting is we sidestep the problem and connect people who can report a map bug but can't be bothered to deal with pain and suffering of potlatch with the people who can deal with it, at least until Richard gets his act together and stops fixing every stupid thing in the old codebase. ...
>>> 
>>> This comment is so completely over the top that for me at least it completely invalidates anything else that SteveC might say. Potlatch is an excellent tool for many users, myself included.
>> 
>> It mostly works for me too, but we have a lot of patience. If you look at the bigger picture beyond us though it's very hard to use and there's a much better codebase waiting in the wings. It doesn't look like that will be finished. Now, you can dance around that and talk about how receptive Richard is:
>> 
>>> It has been improving steadily, and in my experience Richard Fairhurst is very thoughtful and receptive.
>> 
>> And that's fine, and he is thoughtful... but at the end of the day that doesn't make PL any easier to use. The simple fact is that PL2 needs to get finished and PL1 needs to be put in to an end-of-life freeze. I don't see that happening, but I do see hundreds of frustrated people at conferences (like I did yesterday) who give up on it when really we should be welcoming them. So I'd prefer not to pretend there isn't a problem, there is, it's big, and we should try to do something about it.
> 
> I know you don't personify CloudMade but if you think Potlatch 2 is
> such a high priority perhaps CM could have helped with its development
> instead of striking out on its own with Mapzen - an editor that's also
> written in AS3.

I think you're forgetting just how hard it was to convince Richard that AS3 was a good idea in the first place :-)

> Aside from that I don't know how closely you follow Potlatch 1
> development but most of the changes in the last half year have been
> purely bugfixes: i18n fixes, Haiti / nearmap imagery support etc.

Sure, sure, but the point is that if you spent those same man hours on PL2, it would be here by now.

> But as we can't change the past work on making it an alternative to
> Potlatch on the main site (as well as offering JOSM as another
> alternative).
> 
> This is something I brought up on IRC yesterday. I think it would be
> nice to change the Edit tab so that when the first time you use it
> you don't get Potlatch but a short page showing screenshots & a short
> explanation for the most popular editors, with an emphasis on the
> Potlatch/Mapzen icon explaining that you can edit "right now" if you
> go that route.
> 
> Then after that when editing you'd get a short message somewhere on
> the page saying "You're editing with Potlatch [<link>configure another
> editor</link>]"

I think this is a cool idea.

Yours &c.

Steve





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