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Comment by clarry | Hacker News Reader

So for those of you who live in the US, congrats.

The situation in my area is nowhere near as good. I've got a couple Garmin GPSes as well as a GPS capable phone, and I would just love to map every road and path in a 100km radius from home. Unfortunately all the mapping software I've tried is so horribly slow I'd have to buy a new computer to be able to do much at all with the data I can collect.

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> So for those of you who live in the US, congrats. The situation in my area is nowhere near as good. I've got a couple Garmin GPSes ...

This smells of FUD. First, we are talking about OSM. Not whatever tiny dataset is loaded onto a Garmin. Second, you did not name your location.

Any time someone says "oh, you can't use online maps in $country" I pick some little town in the middle of nowhere and OSM consistently has three times as many roads as the Big Name maps.

> Unfortunately all the mapping software I've tried is so horribly slow

You don't need mapping software. Just wander around, export to GPX and upload the GPX to OSM. Someone else can do the editing from your traces.

This smells of FUD.

OSM is cool. Like I said, I would love to help with it, and I've got the tools I need to collect data. So what is my motive to lie about it? Why would I spread FUD?

Any time someone says "oh, you can't use online maps in $country" I pick some little town in the middle of nowhere and OSM consistently has three times as many roads as the Big Name maps

Okay, let me give you a couple examples I am familiar with. Plenty of stuff is missing or just plain wrong, right in town (now Google isn't perfect either but the coverage is much better). It only gets worse once you get out of town.

https://maps.google.com/?ll=62.316531,27.857552&spn=0.042946...

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/62.3181/27.8425&layers=...

---

https://maps.google.com/?ll=62.065628,28.308163&spn=0.043304...

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/62.0659/28.2959&layers=...

Most of the time the country in question was in central/south america or africa. I would never have expected Finland to be a counter-example. Thank you.

But pretty much everyone else in your thread here disagrees about the tools part.

Another example.

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=sorsakoski&hl=en&ll=62.448329...

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/62.4494/27.6639&layers=...

What mapping software did you use? Just curious, because when I lived in Bangalore, India, I used to use one of the many android apps that record a gpx file, whenever went cycling. And, I used this mostly when I cycled in parts of the city that weren't mapped well on OSM. Then, all I had to do was upload the gpx files and if I found time I used to annotate street names, landmarks etc. And, nothing in this process seemed resource intensive to be slow.

If you are okay with sharing them, it is straightforward to just upload the traces to OSM:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Upload_GPS_tracks

The visibility of the data can be controlled to some extent:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Visibility_of_GPS_traces

Have you tried either JOSM or Merkaartor? You don't have to use the web interface, and most edits to OSM are not done through it.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JOSM

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Merkaartor

Mapping software?

I thought OSM was mainly edited on the web, right at http://www.openstreetmap.org/traces is where you can upload your GPS traces for instance.

Yes, the web editor is called iD. It is software. It is slow.

You could try the JOSM editor[1], but iD is about as lightweight as it gets, so I am not sure if it would be much better. For what its worth, I use iD regularly without performance issues, but YMMV on older machines. Unfortunately, vector rendering and editing will tend to push browsers to their limit. This may be alleviated somewhat by the use of WebGL in coming years.

[1] https://josm.openstreetmap.de/

iD lightweight? It has trouble rendering a good block of houses when there is a lot of data whereas josm only gets into trouble rendering a small city or so of equally dense data.

You can open an issue here with details about where this occurs and your browser/machine details: https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD

Or send them to me and I will enter the issue.. I'm a collaborator on that project.

Yeah, iD can be slow. If you're just adding roads, the Potlatch 2 editor (available in the dropdown menu next to the edit button) is less polished, but perfectly adequate, and much faster.

I use iD regularly. It doesn't seem slow to me.

My connection is ~1Mbps, so getting the bing aerial images can take a few seconds, but it doesn't really slow my editing down.

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