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Comment by claudius | Hacker News Reader

Can you suggest some applications (Debian) or introductions to use when contributing? I remember having had a look at Merkaator a few years ago and finding it rather unhelpful (or at least neither “very pleasant” nor “actually quite easy”).

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There's now a new and easy-to-use in-browser editor, iD; clicking "edit" on the "default" OSM slippy map gets you there by default, and it even has a walk-through for first-time users: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/51.5011/-0.0194

(As for me, I prefer jOSM - more complex, Java-based, not in-browser; more powerful in various ways: https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Download )

Wow, that's really cool. I just added one road that was missing in the neighborhood.

Yup. For small edits, this is perfect - it's in-browser, well integrated with the default map, plus it has a satellite layer by default :)

iD is fine for lots of edits. It's only when you what to lots of complex things (like relations, administrative boundaries etc) that you should break out JOSM

This indeed looks very cool, thank you and your sibling comment very much!

There are two in-browser editors available from OSM itself, and the site includes tutorials. I've used iD in Chromium on Ubuntu so I'm optimistic that you could use it with Debian. For new lines/nodes you can trace over satellite images and/or upload GPS tracks and trace over them. You can also add metadata to existing data - eg mark a road as one-way for motor vehicles.

I would recommend JOSM (http://josm.openstreetmap.de/) which is Java-based and I find much faster and easier to use than the web-based Potlatch or iD. However, try out iD (the one you get on the website when clicking the 'Edit' button) and see if it works for you.

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