Potlatch – the OpenStreetMap editor

Another handful of little improvements.

• The direction of closed ways (areas) is now shown – i.e. clockwise or anti-clockwise – and you can reverse it. Thanks to all on the dev list for help with the maths!
• Tags are now initially displayed in alphabetical order, with namespaced tags (anything that contains a colon) at the end. This means you don’t have to scroll through several zillion TIGER tags to see anything in the US.
• When you insert a new point into a line, it keeps the line straight – previously it would kink according to the exact mouse position.
• And a few tiny fixes: a bug when shift-clicking to start a new way has been removed; the Repeat button should be a bit better behaved (though I’m not making any promises…!); merging tags won’t insert a bogus semi-colon; and the ‘Really delete?’ dialogue won’t appear if the nodes in a way just have TIGER tags.

The intermittent bug which several users reported with 0.9a, where keypresses would not be acted upon, has been hunted down and terminated with extreme prejudice.

(If you’re interested, it was a result of Potlatch’s new ’splash screen’ that welcomes you to OpenStreetMap editing, which didn’t return the keyboard properly in all circumstances – particularly when loading a GPX file of a certain size. The fix was to enable Potlatch to ’stack’ dialogue boxes, rather than just having one at once, which makes the keyboard handling much more logical.)

The other change with 0.9b is that the custom pointers (pen and hand) are now much faster and smoother – almost on a par with the standard mouse pointer. I stumbled upon a clever Flash property that lets you cache unchanging shapes as a bitmap, which is much faster to move around than the vector shape and its sub-pixel anti-aliasing.

(At the time of writing, trac.openstreetmap.org is down so I haven’t yet been able to commit 0.9b – fixed soon, hopefully.)

A few little fixes – probably the most significant being a slight refinement in how you drag whole ways. You now need to click, hold for a fraction of a second, then you can drag. If you just drag straight away, it won’t move.

(Alternatively, if you’ve already selected the way, you don’t need to hold.)

Cancelling a way move (with Esc) also works properly, too.

Three new features in the latest Potlatch!

The main one is that there’s now an undo tool, which will reverse the last thing you did. Just click the arrow icon in the bottom left to undo, or press Z. (Hovering your mouse over the icon will show you what the action was.)

This is very much a first stab at it: there are a couple of little gremlins still to iron out, and a few things that it won’t undo (such as anything involving relations). It’ll get smoother in the coming weeks; as ever, if you spot a problem, you can report it here or on trac.

Secondly, you can now drag entire ways. This has been added specifically to make it easier to edit the US TIGER data, which is often badly aligned.

And finally, if you’re working with a background image (such as Yahoo or the New Popular Edition), pressing Caps Lock will make the ways and points translucent so that you can see the background more clearly.