Rapid 2.0 launches this week. The Rapid team will host webcasts on April 4 (tomorrow at the time of writing), April 5, and April 6 for Europe / Africa, the Americas, and Asia / Pacific timezones respectively. You can sign up here. You can expect an overview of what’s new, and a live demo. You will also be able to ask the Rapid team questions.

What’s new

I wrote about the public beta of Rapid 2.0 before, and covered what’s new there.

One additional thing I wanted to call out is the ever-growing amount of external datasets available to mappers for efficient mapping of addresses, buildings and other features available as open data. There is a page on the OSM wiki that lists them all, and Esri has an interactive map with all the data sources available and considered as Rapid layers.

You can of course access, search and add the available layers within Rapid itself.

My favorite data layers are still the buildings. Buildings are nice, useful and important to have on the map, and drawing them can be pretty tedious if you care about precise outlines:

Contributing

I’ve started making very small contributions to the Rapid code, mainly to improve on the styling of OSM features on the map. If you see something you would like to see fixed or improved, look over the existing issues and open a new one if you don’t see what you are after. The Rapid team looks at the new issues very frequently and we’re eager to make Rapid the most mapper-friendly editor.

I’m posting this diary as part of my professional work with the Rapid team.