[OSM-talk] Making iD the default editor on osm.org

[Frederik Ramm]

Nop,

> I'm referring to the delete button but also to the
> make-square, make-round and rotate options. You do not need these to draw
> streets on top of tracks or aerial imagery, which is the basic start of
> mapping.

Quite a few people start with tracing buildings nowadays, a task for 
which this functionality is very important. By no means should "tracing 
of buildings" be an "expert task"!

(It would be cool if the "make square" tool would reject the making 
square of very un-square things like roundabouts, but all our other 
editors will happily square a circle for you so it would be a bit unfair 
to demand different from iD I think.)

> I tried deleting a few things and there was no warning that I was acting
> destructively. The warning before saving is too general and the list of
> change objects also does not indicate whether I did something dangerous.

Our current entry-level editor, Potlatch 2, doesn't "warn that you're 
acting destructively" when deleting objects either. A couple good ideas 
have been floated about reducing the trash-can prominence in iD; don't 
you think that might already solve the problem?

> I believe that immediate warnings when you do something dangerous (and an
> expert switch to disable them later) would be very helpful to prevent damage
> and teach the user how to proceed.

I think one shouldn't be religious about warnings/questions/popup 
messages - sure it's a UI challenge to do them well but simply not doing 
them at all, ever, doesn't automatically mean you have a good UI. 
However, a pop-up message every time you have deleted something would 
surely be stretching it!

--> Going off on a tangent here and leaving the scope of immediate iD 
improvements - someone else has posted that a while ago in a different 
discussion. Maybe we are far too obsessed with trying to make sure 
nothing is ever broken in an edit session. Maybe we should focus more on 
post-processing of edits. Give users the option of saying "I'd like 
someone else to review my edit". If user does that, a special tag 
("review=yes") is set on the changeset. A list/map of such "changesets 
for review" could then be generated and processed by users who are 
interested in helping. Before too long we'll have feature where 
changesets can be commented/discussed which would go nicely with this.

> What's more, the existing icons would confuse me as a newcomer.

Then again, only real newcomers count in that department - of course 
*my* first time with iD was confusing because I was used to other 
editors, and it will have been no different with you.

> I agree with the previous posts that OSM should not create a connection to
> Facebook, Twitter or any other social service without conscious choice by
> the user

There seems to be a potential solution to this - making these things 
into "post-edit plugins" that the user would activate. The open question 
is whether the current options (FB, Twitter) should be shelved until 
plugins are available, or kept live until plugins are available. There's 
a github issue here https://github.com/systemed/iD/issues/1706 - tmcw 
has already said that the issue is low priority on his side but of 
course anybody else with Javascript proficiency for whom this is a high 
priority could chip in with a pull request any time!

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"