OpenStreetMap
Whats in the pipeline for the next Vespucci release?
Posted by SimonPoole on 19 January 2016 in English. Last updated on 27 January 2016.We’re well on the way for the next Vespucci release, a rough list of what I’m working on can be found on github. Numerous changes have already been implemented, here I just want to touch on the most interesting one for now.
Long time users may remember when the tag editing UI looked like:
The image is from version 0.7.0 which dates back to 2011/2012 (before I even knew it existed), I haven’t been able to find older screen shots, but I suspect it looked similar in 2009 in the first version. Mid last year I refactored the tag editing code to support a multi-page view and lots of other improvements, resulting in:
One of the goals of that effort was to make extending the tag editing UI easier and that has now beared fruit in allowing a simple preset-driven form based editing interface to supplement the old key-value editing:
This might sound straightforward, however there is no guaranteed one-to-one matching of presets to OSM elements which may have attributes for multiple real-world objects tagged (finding the correct preset is key to determining the correct values for each tag). I’ve taken an iterative approach to addressing this by trying to find the best match, adding all tags that belong to that preset, then adding all tags from linked presets and then repeating this for the remaining tags and so on. So far the results look good.
There are still a couple of rough edges which need to be smoothed out, but I expect a test build with this feature to be available in a couple of days.
Update: first beta with new UI https://github.com/MarcusWolschon/osmeditor4android/releases/tag/0.9.8-beta-1
Discussion
Comment from santamariense on 19 January 2016 at 21:32
Is it possible to charge a preset from JOSM to Vespucci?
Comment from SimonPoole on 19 January 2016 at 22:00
@santamariense you don’t have to change anything see http://vespucci.io/help/en/Presets/ (note that vespucci uses a different (better) translation system).
Comment from gileri on 19 January 2016 at 22:11
Neat ! Can’t wait to test it out :)
Comment from santamariense on 19 January 2016 at 23:01
That’s great. I’ll test it soon.
Comment from RobJN on 19 January 2016 at 23:52
Looks good. Is getting close to something that I can recommend to non-OSMers now :-)
Comment from CloCkWeRX on 20 January 2016 at 00:43
Awwww yis.
Comment from SimonPoole on 20 January 2016 at 06:10
@RobJN that naturally leads to the question: what is a non-OSMer supposed to be doing with an OSM editor?
Seriously, the changes are mainly geared towards making the common use cases faster and simpler for users with a reasonable knowledge of OSM. It is not targeted at users that have no further interest than a hit and run contribution, just as any other editor in OSM space (iD, P1/P2, JOSM). For hit and run contributors (nothing against them except that we don’t cater for them) we don’t really have any non-broken solution outside of submitting a note.
Comment from RobJN on 20 January 2016 at 12:43
@SimonPoole: Becoming a OSMer! Surely that was obvious. It’s a shame that you don’t value what you call “hit and run” contributors. Here in the UK we talk about having a mapper in every town and village. In some cases this will mean that the mapper will be relatively inactive, but if they keep their village up to date they are very welcome in the UK community.
Comment from SimonPoole on 20 January 2016 at 15:15
@RobJN You are spinning what I wrote for political leverage.
Naturally I value the hit and run contributions just as I said, it is just that trying to force them to use an OSM editor -doesn’t- value them as what they are, people that what to add something small that they noticed was missing or fix a spelling error etc. without having to actually engage with OSM. Editors are the –COMPLETLY– wrong tool for that, (that includes all the so called (broken) “simple” editors).
Comment from rmikke on 3 February 2016 at 16:28
How about opening hours editor? AFAIK it was planned for some future version?
Comment from SimonPoole on 3 February 2016 at 18:00
@mikke see https://github.com/MarcusWolschon/osmeditor4android/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+milestone%3A0.9.8 unluckily the oh spec is very complex and difficult to map to a reasonable UI which is the only reason it is delayed.