The latest Potlatch is now live.
The main new feature is a super new “parallel path” feature, which will create a way at a given offset – in metres – from another one. So if you’ve driven along one carriageway of a motorway, but not the other, you can still map both – just draw the first one, then create a parallel path at the right offset.
To use it, select the way, then press ‘P’ for parallel. Potlatch will ask you what offset to use – you can choose from a handful of presets, or enter your own. Click ‘Ok’ and two offset ways will be created, one on either side. Delete the one you don’t want, and unlock (click the padlock) the one you do – after adding intersections, tags and so on, of course.
A few other changes:
- The ‘loading ways’ display (top right) now tells you whether it’s saving data, too.
- When you zoom in/out, ways are redrawn (at the new width) gradually, not all at once. This means that Flash Player won’t seem to hang every time you zoom.
- A new option, “Highlight unnamed roads”, will show any unnamed highways with a red border (casing) – particularly useful in cities where people have traced from Yahoo aerial imagery. It’s just like the NoName layer on the static map.
All of Northumbria and Cumbria are now on Potlatch’s NPE layer (at zoom level 14, of course) – plus Doncaster which was accidentally missed off the last release.
The two remaining gaps are a “central belt” across Northern England (the Pennines, Yorkshire etc.), and the South-East. (Scotland will be done later.)
Now live (thanks Tom, wherever you are!). Nothing major has changed, just a big bunch of small bugfixes and performance enhancements.
Potlatch 0.10c is now live.
Changes include:
- little floating alerts that go beep: these show up if, for example, you try to merge two ways with differing tags, or that don’t share a point
- locked nodes show up red: typically after importing a GPX with waypoints
- performance improvements
- a few new ‘advanced user’ features:
- press K to lock/unlock a way or node
- press M to maximise/minimise the editor window
- press S to add a source= tag based on the current background (Yahoo/NPE)
- major bug fixed that caused duplicate nodes when the server was slow
- latest translation update
- and various other bugfixes
Some really exciting stuff coming up in the next few months… more soon.
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.
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)…
