We had a London pub meet-up back at the Monkey Puzzle in Paddington on Wednesday.

It was just the usual crew there, and we had plenty to chat about. The obvious topic of the day was reactions to Steve's big push for a front page re-design, which seemed to have wound a few people up on several levels. Personally I only read the blog posts/tweets (steve, TomH, Blackadder, RichardF, Steve again, etc) but from that I can gather that there was a few "lively debates" on the mailing list. So we chatted about all of that, and about how evil Steve is.

We did also get onto actually discussing front page U.I. here's a few snippets of what was said:

-Should the (+) layer picker be expanded by default?

-What layers should be on there? Add lots? need to be scaleable tile services

-Does anyone use the maplint layer? Can be hazardous to new users

-Change (+) to the nice new icon representing layers

-Get rid of the textual description of OSM?

-Increase width of the left column?

-Put a larger search bar at the top? Could be bad for netbooks. Prime screen space

I could try to summarise various high level ideas, but that's been done by various blog posts (e.g. those linked above). Actually I think a good place to do that would be the Front Page Design wiki page (I haven't done so yet. I think it would work well if we move the comment/opinion off that page and state various ideas)

One high level idea I will mention, is that perhaps the interface could be improved gradually, rather than by a radical shake-up. Evolution not revolution. Areas of the site elsewhere present some more obvious opportunities for improvement. Back in November Andy made a little list of minor UI fixups. This came up in conversation. The improvements were so minor that TomH just went ahead and did them all in the past few days! For example we now have facebook style diary & comment mugshots. Nice! I'm sure there are many more little tweaks like this, which dont present complicated trade-offs like the front page design does.

There was a lot of talk about Potlatch 2 (code) (README) The new version of Potlatch. Andy tells us development is progressing well. The editor is starting to be quite functional, though no delete support yet. It's quite easy to get to grips with compiling and developing the code, plus there's a fair amount of work to do with things like designing pretty icons for all the tags, and creating XML tag lists.

There was also a lot of talk about git.

Jenny talking to TomH: "What's git? You're a git, but apart from that?"

Git is a distributed source code management system. In open source circles it's fast becoming more popular than subversion. It's all very decentralised. As wikipedia puts it, "Every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server." We probably want to switch to using git rather than SVN for OpenStreetMap code, so the question we discussed at length was, what kind of workflow does TomH follow as he decides when and what code to deploy to the live server? What repository should be hosted on OpenStreetMap's server, and/or does OpenStreetMap need to have an "official" presence on github or gitorious. Not sure if all those questions were answered conclusively.

So in general it's was a small gathering and we were all having some important discussions, and all being very serious. Well almost all of us...
more photos on flickr

We need to get serious about some proper hacking (or a design brainstorming developer meet-up) so...

Hack weekend early 2010 - When shall we do it?

The next pub meet-up will be by Tower Bridge