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Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

high5apps.github.io

61–70 of 114 posts

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#61
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another option for apple would have been to just wait for a few months. They are downstream of osm but updates are slow. Likely your "propagated within minutes" was misleading. Almost no app, certainly not a mainstream app your customers might use, is reading osm live. They're all days to months behind on periodic batch updates.

Months behind is not fair. Apps like Komoot, OSMAnd or CoMaps have monthly refresh cycles. Others are shorter and yes there are longer (mostly obscure) update cycles such as apple maps, Uber, https://transportnsw.info/

In my experience, the bigger the app, the longer the update cycle. They likely have a QA and integration process to deal with how osm combines with other sources. Something like osmand is basically just an osm wrapper, so they can be fast.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#62
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every Door is definitely one of the easier ones and I like it but dang I wish the dev could get more funding to make it a nicer UX. Between the glitchy raster tiles and need to click load data all the time I feel it gets tiring fast. I've considered building a separate app that's similar but oriented around the idea of using voice of pictures to update things (with AI extracting and formatting the data for you to rev…

Isn’t that a door (haha) opened by our supreme new AI coding overlords: that now it’s possible to take the Every Door source code (it’s on Github), and throw it into a coding agent with the instruction to „improve without breaking functionality“, and with some iterations and human validation that yes, the UX is now indeed better, play the changes back with a PR?

UX is one of the things AI isn’t good at. You can ask it for specific changes but just “make it nicer” is unlikely to work.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#63
post #28

One thing to note: OSM edits are associated with your account. Do not use your regular user name, or people can easily identify where you live since people tends to edit nearby locations. If you accidentally did that, I believe there's a way for the admin to scrub that for you.

I'm not too concerned about my place of residence, since the state already publishes my full address online. But OSM edit history also shows the various places you visit, with timestamps too. I still haven't decided if I want to do something about that or not. It's certainly something new contributors should be aware of.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#64

> Do NOT use search results for social media profiles This seems a bit outdated as many restaurants/shops now consider they FB/insta page as their "official" website (or rather lack of).

It's a dumb thing to do too. If you have a website, you control what it says. For a shop or restaurant it's totally fine to just show a nice photo with your name, opening hours, address, and contact details, and just link to whatever social media accounts and reservation/delivery ordering platform you use. It's also the place that will allow you to inform your patrons when big tech deletes your heavily invested in so…

My experience is most restaurant websites are either outdated, offline, or hacked and showing some malware page. While the social media page is up to date.

While all of then problems you list are real, small restaurant owners don’t have the time or skills to run a website, having a social media and listing on the maps apps is enough.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#65
On iPhone, so far "Go Map!!" works well for my simple edits, which are things I notice while walking on the sidewalk.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Go_Map!!

(The double exclamation marks in the name drove me away initially, so I tried 3 others first, none of which worked well on the iPhone for my edits, but then "Go Map!!" seemed to just work.)

For edits that can be done from desktop, the OSM official Web site's editor was pretty good -- complicated, but seems to work, and has a nice interactive tutorial mode.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#66

I was put off by co tributing to osm at first when someone brought up that 300mb java monster application at first actually. Luckily i found there's an online editor and did my first edits there. I would definitely not recommend josm for a newcommer

I’d also recommend StreetComplete, which makes contributing to OSM as easy as playing Pokemon Go.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#68
https://streetcomplete.app - basic task-based, on-the-ground, app for Android

https://every-door.app - intermediate on-the-ground app for smartphones

https://rapideditor.org - AI-assisted mapping in browser

https://www.hotosm.org - task-based mapping in browser

https://josm.openstreetmap.de - advanced editor for desktop (this post)

https://www.comaps.app - actually use the map with ability to make minor changes

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#69
After you create an OSM account, there is also https://maproulette.org, which has tons of little tasks to fix, grouped into challenges, and many of them can be done using just the aerial photos, from the comfort of your seat.

Then there is also mapping for humanitarian purposes, https://tasks.hotosm.org/, which has mapping projects prepared by disaster response teams, and you can help by updating maps of areas recently affected by disasters. E.g. recently there was a lot of mapping in the area hit by the August river flood in Nepal.

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