We've started doing London winter pub meet-ups. Very similar to previous events but involving zero mapping. This is the usual procedure when the clocks go back. It becomes too dark for effective mapping, but as it happens this year it's also becomes bitterly cold at the same time. Double-excuse for heading straight to the pub.

On Tuesday we went to the Monkey Puzzle. An old favourite, but we haven't been there for a while, so some people hadn't been there before and got a bit lost finding it. It's not a proper geo meet-up if this doesn't happen.

I proudly showed off my shiny new android phone ("Orange San Francisco" £99 on PAYG) and Matt recommended a few android apps to install, particularly "Mapdroyd". I've also played around with "RMaps" which works well for general viewing. At some point I'll spend a bit longer getting to grips with the various options for map viewing/mapping Android apps. I'll probably try to document some findings on the wiki. App listings on the wiki such as the Android page are looking more organised these days, but a lot of the individual pages could do with more information. We're particularly going for OSM-oriented information (how to switch to OSM tiles? can it be used for recording tracks? etc) If you like testing/reviewing apps, get stuck in!

I was also showing off the thing I've been working on. "placr.mobi" (More on my blog. Since then I've been adding new features and improvements, including a map!) I was also checking out how the website looks on the various mobile devices we had in the pub...

This included amazon kindles which Derick and Jon had with them. Everyone was interested to play with these. They're a bit smaller and bit more weird than we were expecting. The screen in the low-light of a pub is strangely not glowing. Hardly like a device at all. They seem to render the OpenStreetMap homepage pretty well too (more info)

We were also playing with QR reading apps and Matt's new QR coded osm.org moo stickers. He was giving them out. Meanwhile Andy was also giving out some awesome OpenStreetMap leaflets. These are ones which Frederick designed and had printed in Germany (source files). There are several thousand of them stacked up in Andy's house now, but he got rid of a few of them in the pub.

Andy was also telling us about some fun tabs vs spaces battles in the Potlatch 2 code. He's also seen some working early code for support of Bing imagery in Potlatch 2. There was lots of talk about Bing of course. It's spectacular resolution in the UK. We can see the one-way arrows painted on the road!. It's not like that over the entire world of course. I don't really have a good feel for how much extra coverage we'll get around the world, but it's generally better than Yahoo!'s imagery (more info) We also speculated about microsoft's tactics in helping OSM in this way. OpenStreetMap is becoming a player, or maybe just a pawn, in the big corporate battle for map supremacy, but ultimately we're transcending all that with our mission to free the world's geodata. It is interesting to see how companies work with the community. As I commented on James Fee's blog, I'm really impressed by mapquest's contributions.

Speaking of Mapquest, Andy was saying they're interested in exploring possibilities for new tools to help improve routability of the U.S. data. We talked about my tortuous routes map which I haven't updated in about a year (wiki explanation), but that's partly because it reached the end of its useful life fairly quickly. There's no longer any glaringly tortuous routes, but there are of course many more subtle routing problems remaining in the U.S. (It has to be an amazingly un-subtle problem, to show up on that analysis) We discussed ideas for other tools to try and pick up on routing problems. Maybe some sort of generic "permeability" visualisation.

Jon was there, and we talked about the main Mapnik tileserver which he nurses. Firefishy reckoned we're serving in excess of 10 Terrabytes per month from that server now.

We talked about WhereCampUK which happened last weekend up in Nottingham. I suppose I should write a separate blog post about it.

SK53 was at that, and then he went on Sunday to Swindon to help out at a MapAction training course. He was there along with Nick Whitelegg to see what was going on, and teach them about OpenStreetMap. They're very much of an ArcGIS kind of persuasion, so not really clued into the OpenStreetMap way of doing things, but clearly loads of scope for productive collaboration. As with many 'aid organisation' interactions, we could do with making a super-official looking site on hot.openstreetmap.org. Also we mentioned providing clearer points of contact.

...As ever, I've managed to write a much longer diary entry than you might imagine would be possible based on a chats around a pub table. The best thing is to experience these things first hand though, so join us next time! The date is already set:

Next one Wednesday 8th December

There's also the OSM Christmas Party coming up on Fri 17th December. Put it in your calendar!