Making Mapzen Even Easier and More Fun to Use
Making Mapzen Even Easier and More Fun to Use
Its just over a month since we launched Mapzen – the easy to use OpenStreetMap editor. Since then, the intuitive user interface and focus on ease of use has caught the attention of users and the media (see New Scientist, Mac World, ZDNet and our own Press Zone). Over the holidays we released a set of updates to Mapzen that address many of the comments early users have made. Here’s a summary of the updates that were made in the “Mapzen Beta Uhniv” release, on the 24th December 2009:
Bug fixes
One of the biggest problems reported by some Mapzen users was with saving data – the annoying “Oops – a big error has occurred” problem was our highest priority for this release. We tracked down all of the known causes of this problem and they are now be fixed for good. We also added an automatic reporting system – so Mapzen will tell us if it incurs any problems when saving or editing data. Other bug fixes included more reliable loading of satellite imagery and more reliable rendering of lines – stopping the problems that occasionally made lines disappear.
Giving you more space to work
No-one likes working in a small, constrained screen space, so we increased the size of the work area in Mapzen:
More objects to edit
There are thousands of different types of map features in OpenStreetMap – each often with several variations and combinations. WIth Mapzen we boil all of this choice down to the features and attributes you need for mapping. With each release of Mapzen we’ll add some new map features, modify others and even remove features or attributes that user do not find useful. In this release of Mapzen we added loads of new features, including:
- New icons for a whole load of exciting features including funicular railways, gondolas and drag lifts – just in time for the skiing season
- New icons for boundaries including city walls, fences, hedge lines and gates
- New landuse types including scrub
- New POIs including drinking water and recycling
New features make map editing in ski resorts easy
Another hugely requested feature was clearer one-way arrows for roads, also updated in this release:
Coming up next
The next release of Mapzen will focus on improving usability – particularly the way in which users interact with roads. For example, we know you find it annoying to have to click once to select a node and again to drag it when you are re-shaping a road, so we’ll be updating this behaviour so that to make it easier and quicker for you to drag and re-align roads – something that all the TIGER editors out there spend a lot of time doing.
We’ve also heard that users in areas with a landuse shapes can find it hard to edit roads. To solve this problem we’ll be adding controls that let you turn off landuse – making it far easier to edit roads in these areas. We’ll post some screenshots as soon as we have working internal versions.
What else?
There are lots of exciting features in the queue for Mapzen from speed enhancements to improved hints to merging of ways to easier selection of map features. We’ll be releasing a poll in the next few weeks that will let you choose which features you want to see implemented first – so stay tuned.
In the meantime you can leave feedback about Mapzen or report bugs at the Mapzen Issue Tracker or you can get in touch via email.
Making Mapzen Even Easier and More Fun to UseJanuary 4th, 2010 - Posted by Nick Black in Uncategorized, cloudmade, mapzen, news, openstreetmap, products | | 4 Comments
on January 4th, 2010 at 11:58 am
Does it offer Support for WMS?
on January 4th, 2010 at 2:49 pm
Not sure, that hiding of areas will completely solve the problem. In my opinion, user should be able to select any object, even if it is located behind the polygon.
on January 4th, 2010 at 3:14 pm
Hi Georg – we don’t support WMS at the moment. What would you like to use it for?
on January 5th, 2010 at 1:16 am
I notice in one of those screen shots that there are a few polygon features with POI icons inside of them, but not centered. This indicates to me that the POI icon is actually a separate node, but one which probably represents the same feature already represented by the polygon. Ideally in OSM, only the polygon is needed, which would have all the tags that might otherwise be put on a single node to represent the feature. It is an error for an editor to place a node just to make the icon appear. If Mapzen doesn’t automatically draw an icon in the center of polygon-mapped features, it may lead users to place a node, possibly duplicating information already in the polygon’s tags.
Since you focus so much on user-friendliness, I imagine the typical Mapzen user will tend to base their mapping and tagging practices on what looks good in the Mapzen editor versus the correct way to map and tag features. Therefore you must strive to make sure that the correct way looks best in your editor. You can start by making sure that if a polygon has (for example) the tag “amenity-college” then an appropriate icon should be placed in that polygon, just as if the tag were on a single node.
P.S. Potlatch also fails to draw POI icons for polygon-drawn features, but I think its users pay more attention to correct tagging because Potlatch doesn’t try to draw everything in an “intuitive” way to the extent that Mapzen does.