Potlatch – the OpenStreetMap editor

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.)