Filed under: news
Potlatch 0.10b is live. There’s two improvements over 0.10.
Firstly, the relations dialogue is laid out differently (this was actually 0.10a!), and has a new option to search for a relation by name or ID. So if you’re mapping a long-distance cycle route, and the only other mapped part is 50 miles away, you can still use the same relation. This has also squashed the bug where users in non-English languages couldn’t creat relations.
Secondly, you can now see history for nodes as well as ways. Just select the point or POI, then either press ‘H’ as usual, or click the ID at the bottom left.
This dialogue also gives you access to OSM’s clever data browser (click ‘More’), or to directly e-mail a user who carried out a particular edit (click ‘Mail’).
Finally, those in the UK will notice that NPE coverage has been slowly expanding and now covers Wales, the Midlands, East Anglia, the Chilterns, Cotswolds, Wessex Downs and south/central Lakes.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Filed under: news
One for the UK mappers: Potlatch now has a big chunk more of the out-of-copyright New Popular Edition map to trace from. The coverage now includes the West Midlands and Cotswolds, which joins neatly with the Welsh coverage previously available. As ever, you’ll need to be editing at zoom level 14, and select the right background layer, to see it.
Suffolk and the South-West will be next. And I won’t bore you with the trials and tribulations of trying to get the rectifying code to work on OS X 10.5 (Leopard)…
Filed under: news
Now complete and awaiting deployment… more soon, hopefully.
I’m currently working on version 0.10 (yes, I know). The biggest change will be that Potlatch text will be displayed in your language – well, assuming that your language is one of the several for which translations have so far been written. (Thanks, everyone!)
Thus far I have got all the translations read into a single YAML file, involving the usual customary fun with Perl’s Unicode support. Next step is to do the equivalent with Actionscript. This could be, erm, interesting.
Filed under: news
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.
Filed under: news
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.)
Filed under: news
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.
Filed under: news
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.
Filed under: tips
One of Potlatch’s least-known, but most powerful, features is the ability to directly import a GPS track.
Everyone knows that you can click the little eTrex-like GPS icon in the bottom left and show GPS points for the current area. But what if you want to import a whole day’s tracklog at once?
Upload your track as usual. Then, on the ‘GPS Traces’ tab on the site, click the ‘edit’ link to the right of your track – not the one at the top of the screen. Potlatch will open, and after a few seconds, your track will appear in the usual light blue… and you can trace over it as usual.
Extra features
That’s the summary. Here are the fun bits.
First of all, this way, you don’t have to wait for the track to be imported into the database – you can work with it as soon as it’s uploaded. This is hugely useful on Sunday evenings when everyone is uploading their weekend’s mapping and the upload queue stretches to the next continent and back.
Secondly, the waypoints are brought in, too. So you can use your GPS to mark up things you saw while mapping – a gate across a road, perhaps, or the point where a road becomes a track – and get these notes directly into Potlatch. Waypoints are imported as POIs (points of interest), but are “locked”, so they don’t get automatically uploaded to the database. (If you do want to upload them, then just tag them up properly, then click the little padlock by the POI number, and deselect as per usual.)
Automatic conversion
The really, really good bit is that you can automatically convert your tracks to ways. This is no use when you’ve been mapping a housing estate, of course, because you’ll have doubled back on yourself at every cul-de-sac, gone up and down the same road several times, and so on. So you should still trace manually then.
But if you’ve driven along a winding 50-mile rural road, this feature can save you an awful lot of tracing.
To take advantage of this, wait until the GPS track has loaded (light blue line), and then click the ‘Track’ button at the bottom of the page. After a few seconds, a new, bright red way will appear.
Like the waypoints, this way is “locked”, so it’s not uploaded to the database. What you should do is split it, join it to existing ways, and tag it properly – basically, make it a proper part of the map. Then, when you’ve finished, click the little padlock by the way number. The way will turn from red to its proper colour. As usual, deselect to upload.
Converting GPX tracks directly to ways can have a pitfall: if you’ve recorded a trackpoint every second, that’s a lot of unnecessary points on long, straight journeys. So Potlatch does a couple of things to avoid this. When you click ‘Track’, it “simplifies” the track to remove all the unnecessary points on straight lines. (For the curious, this is done using the Douglas-Peucker algorithm.) And it won’t let you unlock a way if there’s more than 200 points, so you should split it into smaller ways first.
Advanced features
As part of Potlatch 0.8b, I’ve added a couple of power-user refinements to the GPS track import. Most users won’t need them, but if you find yourself using this feature a lot, you may appreciate them.
If you find the tracklog-to-way simplification too coarse, and think it makes curves too jagged, you can now hold Shift when clicking ‘Track’. This will run a finer simplification over the track.
(Should Flash ever give you a warning like “A script is causing Flash Player to run slowly”, just continue – don’t abort it. Processing a 20,000-point track can be fairly intensive work. :) )
You can now also edit the query string (the part of the URL after the ‘?’). Usually you’d just have something like ‘?gpx=97019′ – i.e. edit track 97019. But you might want to start editing at a particular latitude and longitude, so you can supply those too: ‘?gpx=97019&lat=51.5&lon=-2.1′. You can also load more than one track at once, by separating the numbers with commas: ‘?gpx=97019,97021&lat=51.5&lon=-2.1′. This is useful if your waypoints are all in one file and your tracklogs in another.
