During the last months I have been spoiling myself a little. I have upgraded my old iPad (first generation) wi-fi 16GB to a new iPad (fourth generation) wi-fi celular 32GB. That means I can access net on travels without the need of activating my cell phone as access point, so it opened some more opertunities to gather data.

I therefor did a heavy sort out of the programs I had on my old iPad, installing the ones I used a lot, the ones I would need for my job, and a few ones for fun.

When I tried to reinstall Mapzen POI collector, which I use on my android phone, and used a little from my old pad I could not get it installed (didn’t find it in App Store), and looking for the other I had (OpenPOI), couldn’t find that one neither, I ended up finding PushPin. I was happy to see that it used Bing! Images instead of Google (openPOI used google), and could swap to OSM Mapnik, also that it allowed to fetch existing POIs just like Mapzen POI collector, and with the latest update also allowed to edit POI areas (not limited to nodes) The only drawback with PushPin is that every edit comes as a separate changeset. I would love to see it keeping edits in same changeset as long as the changeset still is open, and allow me to customize comment field in the changesets.

The way PushPin get my GPS possition allows for me to quickly add POI’s as we are driving (of course as long as I am the passenger) makes it possible for me to collect along the route, and not only where I stop.

What is missing now is a tool to pick up roads to add names and ref (could be included in next update of PushPin?) How I do this now is to edit the address in a POI along that road and than try to remember it so I can go back to the same place next time I open JOSM and correct the road data. This makes for delays, forgetting to correct all roads, missing important data, etc.

What I am loking for now is a routing/navigation app that allows for what I use OsmAnd for on my cell phone as I might swap my phone for an iPhone soon, I am in great need to upgrade my phone, and swapping to iPhone means I will no longer need to have two separate addresbooks, but loosing what I have from OsmAnd means I would still prefere an android for the time being (and since iPhone5 will be availlable in Brazil from end of next week there is a chance that I’ll get one for x-mas)

Next week I will have time again to reassume some of the other maping activities, such as doing Bing tracings, seamarks, INT-1 symbols, MapCSS and JOSM presets, looking more at the new base layer for OpenSeaMap, etc

I have noticed that many roads traced from old Bing are slightly misaligned with the newer recalibrated Bing, which is more alligned with actual GPS traces, I think for most of southern Espírito Santo, shifting roads to allign them with new Bing will greatly improve accuracy of the map.