On one hand, I share the frustration of having lots of new data in an area making some of our tools slower and more difficult to use. In my area a building footprint import slowed down most of the mapping tools and land use polygons can get in the way of editing roads.
On the other hand, I really like that the map looks a lot better at close zooms with building footprints and at some zooms with land use even if neither layer is perfect. This is not just about looks: it is also much better for being sure you are oriented when you are out there and can see the buildings on the map line up with real buildings. Address and POI information looks much better with the context of the buildings they are associated with. I think that one of the strengths of OSM is that people can map what they are interested in, whether it is roads or railways or hiking trails or power lines or bike racks or local businesses. OSM is definitely getting beyond "just streets" in many places and I think that is a good thing to be encouraged and celebrated. If you want to just edit some streets, though, you should not have to download and render every object in the area and have them all active as things you might want to make a junction with. I think the answer is to improve our tools so things we don't care about right now don't get in the way. The renderers include powerful tools for filtering what should be rendered for a particular purpose, can't we use some similar smarts in editors to let people choose: 1. what they are editing 2. what they still want to see but only as inactive background If I invested in getting JOSM working again and learned all its tricks could I do this today? Lately I have just been using Potlatch 2. It is so easy to navigate to the place I want to work on the rendered map, switch to edit mode, edit, scroll to the east, edit, save, done. When I used JOSM I missed the simplicity of the Potlatch work flow so much, but I might be willing to try again. -- Mark Gray _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
