If the goal of your patronizing post was to piss of those on the fence into not signing at all, then bravo for a job well done!

(And, yes, I signed... but only because I don't want hundreds of hours go to waste.)

Dave92,

Will the data that's not used with the API still be used to render the official tiles? If not, it might as well be called lost for practical purposes.

What a clusterfsck. And how very clumsy this was done.

Well, they were dumb enough to change the license and antagonize a whole lot of people for very little benefit (at best).

Also, on one hand, they're changing the license for relatively obscure reasons, but on the other hand we just have to assume that all will be ok? That's not exactly a consequent position, don't you think?

Wow, congratulations! Both on the OSM effort and the thru-hike!

Just a friendly warning: be skeptical about the quality of your tracks, no matter which GPS you've used. Yosemite Valley is one of the more GPS hostile environment...

I've had tracks recorded with a Garmin Edge 305, a Garmin Vista C and various iPhones off by literally hundreds of meters. There seemed not to be any correlation with the presumed quality of the device. Eg sometimes the iPhone was much better than the Edge. IOW always correlate your tracks with aerial pictures.

In any case, Yosemite Valley trails are relatively complete except for trails on the north side. Other sections of Yosemite are often very sparse...

Tom

Tom

... the TIGER data will not be up to date. That's the time to get out the bike/car and start filling in real names, in which case you might as well record it with GPS too.

In case of hiking trails: I've seen the bulk loading case when hunderds of self mapped trails were replaced by a bulk load from the local park authority.

Well... it sucks a little bit, but the end result is better. And that's what it's all about, isn't it?

In case there are aerial pictures and the street topology matches the TIGER data, then GPS traces are not all that useful. But for cities that saw a lot of expansion during the housing boom, the TIGER

Also think about this: the best camera is the one you have with you. The same is true for a GPS. :-)

I have long recorded with both an iPhone and a Garmin Edge 305, now I don't do that anymore: iPhone wasn't significantly better or worse. It's more that one sometimes performs bad and sometimes the other for no obvious reason. At the end of the day, I always correlate my recordings with satellite imagery to make sure there are no major mistakes.

Also funk

Yes, if you can find tiles that are TMS compatible. The Potlatch editor has an option to fill in a custom URL to a TMS server. I've done this many times with my own generated tiles (as I described here: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/wallclimber21/diary/8106 and a bit also here: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/wallclimber21/diary/8209 )

Just to satisfy my curiosity: where do you get the elevation data from?

I share your skepticism.

TIGER data is a gift in that it kick starts that database with roads that cover the whole US. But it also means that bad data (and there's a TON of it) will never see any correction or review. Which makes it very tenuous to rely on it for routing. It's simply not going to work unless you're sure that a particular area has been worked on extensively.

It's more than just county lines or missing intersections. You have zillions of miles of impassable fire roads marked as 'residential'. You have residential streets intersecting with interstates. There are many roads with a location that's off by more than half a mile.

etc.

I *love* OSM because it allows me to add the features I care about on a map (basically: hiking and mountain biking trails). But for routing use, your only real option is a commercial map. I don't see this changing anytime soon.

In addition, you should tag it as
access = private

A good deed would have been to suggest in private if he'd consider switching to OSM, without being condescending.

When he said 'no', you should have dropped the matter right there.

It's as simple as that.

Instead you smear him in public, call him a monster with serious anger management problems.

Do tell: other than the (remote) possibility that the guy sues the crap out of you, what's the upside of doing such a knee-jerk vengeful act? I *really* would like to know, because I can't think of any.

akuckartz is right: it says a lot about the publisher of the email. Legal? Maybe. Ethical? Hell no. This is a disgraceful thing to do and you should be ashamed of it. (And don't even think you're on my team.)

There is nothing serious about his email at all. You annoyed him with a condescending lecture. He got pissed off and told you in no uncertain terms that your interference was not appreciated. Case closed.

What's troubling is that you seem to believe that this is sufficient reason to smear him in public and then try to justify it with more moral superiority and condescending argumentation. "SERIOUS anger management issue", "what kind of monster he really is" ("hyperbole", you should look it up), for the good of "public safety".

Let me reiterate: the guy was mildly(!) annoyed of by a stranger telling him how he should operate his web site. You didn't get the message so you pissed him of even more, so he told you to go FYS.

The only person with problems in this whole story is the one with a serious empathy deficit.

You're accusing me of name calling???

As much as I like OSM, you had it coming with this one. The tone of your initial email was already aggressive self-righteous enough to rub some people the wrong way. Google being evil or not is matter of opinion, not fact. Trying to shove this down the throat of those who've been able to build nice website because Google was to open-minded to create a map API is not going to make you many friends. Most people don't think about this polilitical ways.

Finally, publishing a (heated) private email conversation just because you don't like the way it is going is highly unethical. You're basically smearing this guy forever (The web has an long memory) just because you trying to stick to him like bubble gum on your shoes. Please stop. You're not helping the image of OSM.

Other things:
- the current version of RouteMe is WAY better when zooming in or out in that it will magnify an existing texture is a high resolution one doesn't exist. Use that one.
- show the spinning circle when your downloading something
- make it possible to remove the node display
- I found myself tapping the node rows to update or download them, instead of tapping the download button. Why not put a button there when there are no nodes loaded instead of repeating the same text 3 times? And add a refresh button there too.

Johannes,
You invite feedback on you website, but there's no obvious email address to and them too.

I tried the app (1.5). It's rather unpolished, but I guess I have to wait for the update.

One major problem that makes it more or less unusable in the US is that all nodes of a way that's imported from the tiger data set (99% of all nodes) have extensive (meaningless) tags.

So on your app, only those show up, not actual points of interest. There really should be an option to filter out those TIGER nodes.

Even trail names from the park website may be copyrighted, so I tend to stay away from them. I only use names for trails where I've actually been myself and I often take pictures of the name plates to not forget. That's really the only 'safe' way.

It's normal that TIGER data will show up as 'residential'. That's the default assignement and it's pretty much always incorrect in parks. :-) They're often also very much inaccurate from the situation on the ground. If you *know* the place, feel free to delete, change, do whatever you like to make it more accurate.

For an example of a US map, have a look here:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=37.31788&lon=-122.18589&zoom=16&layers=B000FTF

The SF bay area is very well mapped. When I started mapping a year ago, pretty much all parks were a blank slate. Now they are many hundreds of trails. A few people can have a big impact if the bug bites!

I see you have mapped some trails as 'bridleway'. I haven't seen this tag used a lot of US parks, but it should be good enough for the kind of trails in Harriman.