OpenStreetMap

GORDON'S ALIVE

Posted by Richard on 14 October 2014 in English.

Flash?

And so is Potlatch… just about. (Insert obvious Flash reference here.)

Potlatch 2’s core purposes are (a) being an intermediate-level editor and (b) annoying Germans. It’s never going to get major new functionality or important rewrites, but for those of us happily using it, I’ve always intended to add and fix little things over time.

In the summer it gained support for the editor-imagery-index project, which provides a central list of background imagery suitable for tracing. Today it has a couple of improvements to the long-standing feature where you shift-click away from a way to add a new point (roughly comparable to JOSM’s “Improve Way Accuracy” mode, but we don’t do modes round here) - which is a really useful technique for TIGER fixup.

I’ve also added the ability to memorise tag combinations and recall them by a single keypress. Very simple: press shift and a function key to memorise the tags from the current selection. From then on, pressing that function key will add the tags to the selected items. (Those with long memories may remember this is a Potlatch 1 feature, and one I’ve always meant to add to P2!)

I have a couple of larger features which are 90% coded but were never quite finished, both firmly “intermediate-level” tools. As and when I get the time, I’m hoping to finally finish them off and get them out there.

Discussion

Comment from TomH on 14 October 2014 at 13:39

Importantly it is now translated into many new languages, including Aramaic and Ancient Greek. We are sure our users will find this extremely useful!

Comment from Stalfur on 14 October 2014 at 19:09

Just had a new vandal in Iceland use P2 to create a racetrack covering several hundred km with only 4 points. He couldn’t have done that in iD!

Comment from kucai on 15 October 2014 at 01:25

Good to hear Potlatch is still alive. No better editor at aligning long stretch of highway than this.

Can we have iD like zoom interpolation? Wishful thinking, I know..

Comment from Minh Nguyen on 15 October 2014 at 05:19

Yay for tag memory! Can’t wait for an undelete function so I can finally switch over from Potlatch 1. :^P

Comment from joost schouppe on 15 October 2014 at 16:55

As a heavy, happy, old fashioned Potlach2 user I am glad to hear it is still alive.

And yeay for the undelete function!

Comment from Richard on 15 October 2014 at 17:02

Undelete’s pretty unlikely to make a comeback for a while I’m afraid - the way it’s implemented in P1 is a bit under-the-radar, and it really needs to become part of the official API first. But you never know…

Comment from malenki on 18 October 2014 at 08:40

@Richard: Well done – despite me preferring JOSM very much @Stalfur: what a luck that people using JOSM and iD are so ell trained they never make errors. :)
There is a 14-pages thread in the German forum for bad edits done by inexperienced users combined with the way iD used to handle landuses.

Comment from Robert Whittaker on 25 October 2014 at 12:49

Is the new “shift-click away from a way” stuff documented anywhere? I’d recently noticed that sometimes it was moving an existing node rather than inserting a new node, when I wanted the latter (old) behaviour. Knowing more about what it’s doing now and why/when would be good.

Comment from Richard on 25 October 2014 at 13:01

Essentially it now moves a node, rather than creating a new one, if the nearest point on the existing way happens to be near an existing node. Currently it’s “within 15% of the distance to the next node”, though I’d like to make that distance-sensitive in due course.

Comment from Polyglot on 25 October 2014 at 17:36

Frederik Ramm is on his way to add support for undelete in JOSM. He changed something to the API already during the latest Karlsruhe hackweekend.

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/josm-dev/2014-October/007102.html

I’m a complete JOSM convert now, but at some point I was using both Potlatch1/2 and JOSM alternatingly. Glad to see it got some improvements.

Polyglot

Comment from neuhausr on 27 October 2014 at 19:39

Thanks from another P2 user! (And thanks for the info regarding Robert’s question–I’d noticed the changed behavior too but didn’t understand why it was happening)

Comment from gerdami on 5 November 2014 at 10:11

Thanks from another P2 user! However, I would like more consistency in the tagging feature. Examples: * Field gives landuse=meadow => Replace Field by Meadow * Lake gives natural=water => Replace Lake by Water

Best, gerdami

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