[OSM-talk] New History tab for openstreetmap.org (beta)

Paweł Paprota ppawel at fastmail.fm
Sun Jan 6 15:30:16 GMT 2013


Hi Dave,

Thanks for your feedback - it is exactly what I was hoping for.

>
> Things I've noticed: RSS gives this error: We're sorry, but something
> went wrong.

Thanks, I'll fix that.

> Scroll bar Gets 'stuck' as I move it down & some of the lettering
> doesn't scroll (Firefox  17.01, Shockwave Flash 11.5 r502) Appears to
>  work OK in IE (Haven't got Chrome)

Yes, I'm seeing it on Firefox 17 on Windows (on Linux it's OK). Not sure
what's going on but this looks very similar to the following more
general problem:

https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/162

> When I click on an entity the pop-up balloon sometimes obscures it
> making it hard to see the changes in geometry. Could the balloon be
> positioned further away or make it movable?
>

Yeah, I noticed that too, not sure yet how to handle this properly.

> Requests: Could the permalink be designed to display the history
> side-bar?

Good idea, I added it here:

https://github.com/ppawel/openstreetmap-website/issues/4

> Open click-able pages into new tab as default (personal preference)

Hmm, not sure what to do here. I also prefer using new tabs but for that
I always use middle click.

> Instead of having the 'next page' icon could a continuous scroll be
> employed (similar to how twitter gets older messages)?

I thought about that but there's one problem - if there is continuous
scroll then you will get more and more changesets by scrolling down. And
that means that the user probably expects all of them to be displayed
and that's problematic because browser performance/responsivity
decreases very sharply as the number of geometry features grows beyond
some point.

This still needs to be solved even now with pages limited to 15
changesets - in some cases there is just too much stuff to show and the
browsers freezes.

I would love some thoughts on how to best solve this problem in a way
that is not too complicated for the user.

> When hovering the mouse over an edit in the History bar the entities
> for that edit dim to a light shade. Wouldn't it be better if it was
> the other way around & all others dimmed while the edit your
> interested in were emphasised (something similar to the way relations
> are highlighted in Potlatch)?
>

OK, I will tweak color configuration.

> Thanks for a superb tool that will save a lot of time for checking
> edits.

I'm glad to hear people like it. I hope it will do more than "just" save 
time. I think it really brings OSM data to life and shows that it is 
really a wiki-like mapping project where anyone can change anything.

Anyway, thanks again for your feedback. For the future don't hesitate to 
create Github issues here if you want:

https://github.com/ppawel/openstreetmap-website/issues

I will add a "report a problem/idea" link to the beta version, maybe it 
will help with getting more feedback.

Paweł




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