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Top-level
 The key to IODb's usefulness is collaboration: by using the stored offsets, you indirectly interact with other mappers to share the work. Direct interaction was made possible with the GeoChat JOSM plugin. You see somebody having the same area open in JOSM — you say hi. Also helps avoid conflicts. The protocol and the server are very simple (and hosted on OSM dev instance), I'm suprised it still works. Maybe somebody should remake it for modern age and mobile editors... 99 comments
After two years of mapping, I noticed how OSM took over the major part of my life. So I've turned to programming, because technical solutions are the best, I mean, easiest. "No more mapping" JOSM plugin, once installed, prevents JOSM from launching. Given at the moment the only alternative was Potlatch 2, which was sub-par for JOSM fans, it essentially blocked all mapping. A few days later other developers deleted the plugin and its source code from the JOSM repository. Still remember that. @zverik back in the days: "re-add no_more_mapping plugin after complaints on josm-dev." ... -> https://github.com/JOSM/josm-plugins/tree/c442b1b15f7cd0ee9aee1a6092a904e6b4a189cd/no_more_mapping @1363487 hahaha right :) Alas JOSM development model requires core devs to update all the plugins after API changes, and this plugin was excluded from the updates, so now it just throws exceptions instead of shutting down JOSM. So, back to editors, I guess. I wrote quite a few. Before Every Door, the most known was the low-level one. I didn't think of a name for too long. Level0's main invention was not a user interface, but a user-editable representation of OSM XML. With it, it's pretty easy to edit tags, move or add POI, or even edit line geometries. All while feeling like a hacker. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Level0 It was obviously inspired by the french RawEditor, for which I even made a wrapper first.  @zverik Level0 was a great, easy way for sites (like townlands.ie) to do simple “imports”/“mechanical edits”. I had the tags (in level0 format) which people could add to objects & a link to level0 edit URL. Mappers could open in new tab and paste the tags. Done. Edits in a few clicks. Certain versions of this could be done with @MapRoulette now, I suppose. But level0 formatted tags & a URL is much faster to get working.  @zverik it's unfortunate that there is so little improvement of the interface of the official OSM website. It seems to be stagnant. Is there no one who want to work on it? So this reminds me, right around the Level0 I also finished the project I spent three months on, day to day. It introduced maps to multiple forum engines. MapBBCode is primarily a way to mark a map data in bbcode, which is text. The hard thing was to make a series of libraries and plugins and modules to integrate it and Leaflet into engines like phpBB and FudForum. And then it turned out, finding people to share supporting would be much harder. The last editor I wanna mention is Maps.Me editor. I didn't make it all by myself, obviously, we had a brilliant team, and I just helped from sidelines. It brought a hundred thousand new mappers to OpenStreetMap, although few of them stayed. In my few talks on this I argued it was the future of contributing: millions who don't care about the map, but bring the data. Maps.Me got bought out, so now I recommend its fork, @organicmaps (pictured). Amazing how they still keep going. Support them. To monitor what people were actually editing with Maps.Me, I made a tracker: MMWatch. Alas there are no living instances of it now. The idea was to make a feed that you could easily assess with your eyes. No changesets, lots of filters, all the information presented. Basically that what I expect of modern change monitoring tools, but oh well. "Show Me The Way" did it best. Here you could also mark suspicious edits and revert them with a button. Reverters are kind of editors too.  @ian Frankly I mostly used is as a screensaver. In that regard, it would help to better randomize edits, e.g. skip consequtive edits from the same user. When you observe for minutes how somebody maps buildings in one village, it becomes stale. There could be a brand new project for a "starship console", the same but with walls of relevant text, and maybe better grouping, so you could see a changeset in total. Maybe with options to focus on action, and alerts when something suspicious happens. @ian Depends on the "why". For a screensaver, its value is in showing the diversity of mapping, imo. Hense the density is a downside. For a monitoring tool, I'd first go in the way of filtering changes. Both conventional (e.g. area) and not (e.g. imports, weird buildings and roads, updates to old objects). Since it uses changes, not changesets, it could have some interesting options. Reverting a change has been as important task in OSM as it is impossible. With geodata, there are just too many edge cases. And OSM, unlike Wikipedia, is not a set of objects which you can process independently, it is one big ball of wibbly-wobbly nodely-wayly stuff. So I thought it might be fun to write a proper 3-way reverter myself: https://github.com/Zverik/simple-revert/ It doesn't get too deep in algorithms, hence it can reject a changeset, but if it works, it works 100% without conflicts. And if doing "pip install" is too much work, there is a web version of that, ready for your changeset lists: Of course it's limited, since I don't want to overload mine or API servers. Kamil Monicz (NorthCrab) recently published his own take on such reverter, but the usage of Google's text processing library leads to weird unreported issues when reverting geometry modifications. So be careful: This one is not about OSM, but might be interesting to railway enthusiasts like me :) GeoAlbum is a photo album with geospatial context. The script was inspired by @tmcw 's Big: keyboard navigation, data in html tags. You make an html page, include the library file, and it turns into an interactive album with numbered photos and additional layers. https://github.com/zverik/geoalbum I used it to share photos from a railway construction site along three years: Obviously running command-line tools to produce a map is not ideal for non-GIS people. So I also made a web UI to prepare route maps. You just upload a GPX trace, adjust the printing bounds, add a scale bar if needed, and download a PDF. Another online tool would merge several PDFs into a booklet. It's actually a set of tools underneath, some fix mapnik's SVG issues, some preprocess the values. I know of at least one business spawned from this (not mine obviously). @zverik would you have preferred it would be your own company to make a product out of it? Or do you want to have a different company based on OSM? @TheStroyer I don't want to run a company based on a single product, because I don't have an attention span and management skills for that :) I'm pretty fine with my tools used for business, and with this one, I helped set them up actually. @zverik ah yes short attention span. That's why you have so many different projects 😂 Ten years ago everybody made maps with Mapnik. There were several scripts that simplified the task, but all had issues. So I wrote another. Nik4 makes preparing a map image easy. No calculations needed, just choose an area, put physical or pixel dimensions, and you got the exact map you expected. https://github.com/Zverik/Nik4 There were many little features inside that removed hassles. Like partial rendering, scale factors, ppi and route fitting. And fixing cairo's SVG output. Of course another question that was heard from every business, "how do we get the tiles". Mapnik had a sample python script packaged, but it was slow and hard to use. I'm pretty good at APIs, so I made my own. Polytiles can render regular raster tiles for a given bbox in multiple threads. Obviously. It also can use a polygon file or a relation from OSM, it can render retina tiles, generate an mbtiles file, or just produce multiple lists for other tools. And back to my projects from days back, that still operate. In the same trend, seeing something and improving on it, I took Frederik's BigMap and added an online tile-stitching service. The UI is the same, still bad, but it's the easiest way to get a raster map for an area. And also georeferencing files for OziExplorer or QGIS. Many people use it daily. I see how it could be made better, faster and easier, but as always, not enough time. And no alternatives haha.  @zverik Have used this one (grabbing the generated Perl script) - thank you for this tool :) How is georeferencing done? @richlv Thanks for using it! Georeferencing is simple — it's tiles, we know exact locations of all corners :) Just download a WLD file and put it near the image. @zverik Ah, is this a usecase like "download tile files locally and use them as a georeferenced layer"? I'm only doing OSM in an amateurish way, thus these GIS things are another world for me =) @richlv Yes, exactly. A good alternative to adding a live OSM layer and re-downloading tiles every time something moves. @zverik Neat, thank you for the explanation. Maybe one day I'll find time to dig more into these topics :) When belgian OSM guys made the Welcome Tool in 2016, I set up an instance for Russia and started welcoming people. I sent a few hundred messages, and after promoting the tool, some other mappers did too. Alas the response rate was like one percent. And when I got replies, sometimes I wished I hadn't. But without welcoming messages, people in OSM feel themselves in a vacuum. There are still no links to communities anywhere on osm.org. Here's the global WT instance: https://welcome.osm.be/  @zverik maybe you have some suggestions on how to improve https://openstreetmap.org/communities ? One idea being floated around is to embed the OSM Community Index map somehow in that page. (The list of local chapters is already dynamically based on the index.) @seav Start with a big bold link to the forum on the "Communities" page! Generally I'd take the hint from the iD editor. It does a pretty good job of listing links after you upload a changeset.  @zverik ooof I feel that one. Have started making my first contributions in years (because I realized I can add bike racks) but it might as well be posting into the void. Today, brownouts start for OAuth1a endpoints. In a month, only OAuth2 can be used. One of my services using OAuth1 is OSM Authentication Proxy. Since storing passwords is bad, and OAuth sometimes is too hard to implement (you need a browser!), I made this proxy. Essentially it's a website that says "yes, the person with the token is indeed an OSM user". It doesn't upload anything to OSM API. I thought of using it for command-line tools and plugins, but ended up not. @zverik @organicmaps OrganicMaps makes it easy to *add* a place, but I never found how to *edit* one.  @organicmaps @fla @zverik I also don’t have an Edit button on iOS. On the newest Testflight version 2024.03.31 (7). @roaldarboel @organicmaps @fla Edit button is not shown if maps are older than three months. Could you plz check that your maps are updated? @zverik @roaldarboel @organicmaps Ah, indeed, that's the reason! Well, would have been better to still display the button but then explaining that maps have to be updated first. |
Gregory's Server
How much do you like mapping? Do you map every day? Do you WANT to map every day?
Inspired by other streak-tracking tools, from Pascal's HDYC to github, I have made a simple game: submit a changeset every day, and gain points. A bonus point if you do the task.
http://streak.osmz.ru/
The healthy thing would be to reach several hundred points and drop this. Please make breaks in your mapping! Tomorrow I'll show you how I did it.