

A New Editor for OpenStreetMap: iD - rachbelaid
http://mapbox.com/blog/announcing-id/
Funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation, today they are announcing the launch of ideditor.com, home of the web-based OpenStreetMap editor iD currently in Alpha phase. This launch marks a stepped up involvement in the development of this editor. iD is designed to help create an even better, more current OpenStreetMap by lowering the threshold of entry to mapping with a straightforward, in-browser editing experience.
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NelsonMinar
MapBox is an amazing company. This new editor is very early alpha but already
excellent and usable. Good editing tools should be a huge boost for
OpenStreetMap. Funny that OSM is getting a modern editing tool before
Wikipedia.

The Javascript libraries they're using are interesting. D3 is a big part of
it, but equally notable is that there's no conventional slippy map library
like OpenLayers or Leaflet. Instead they're doing something simple with
d3.geo.tile, a relatively new component.

Particular attention is due to MapBox's OAuth implementation ohauth, purely
client-side (no server proxy): <http://mapbox.com/osmdev/2013/01/15/oauth-in-
javascript/> They also use RTree (for spatial indexing), Lo-Dash (an
Underscore alternative), and a few extra bits like JXON for XML, the async
library Queue, and Bootstrap tooltips.

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jpatokal
FWIW, Wikipedia's Visual Editor has been in public beta since December, and
it's arguably a much harder job because of the baroque complexity of
MediaWiki's markup.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor>

Not that this takes anything away from MapBox's achievement, and OSM were
foresighted in choosing a sanely structured data model that allows things like
this.

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crisnoble
This looks amazing, props to MapBox for putting out yet another beautiful,
approchable and useful tool.

From the product page[<http://ideditor.com/>]:

"We’re building iD in pure Javascript, using d3.js and SVG for map display."

This has got to be the coolest non-graphing use of d3.js I have seen so far.

Anyone who hasn't should view the demo here: <http://geowiki.com/iD/>

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dguaraglia
Wow, this is amazing! I always wanted to contribute to the OSM project,
specially because my area (Sacramento) isn't that well mapped, but I found the
tools to be cumbersome and difficult to use. This changes the game.

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frendiversity
I said they should rename it because iD is taken by the makers of a popular
game called DooM. I have no opinion of the quality of the service but it looks
good. I apologize for my snarky comment.

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tmcw
Point taken :), the name is quirky, hard to google, and surely used for other
things. The eventual goal, though, is for it to be just 'the openstreetmap
editor' with iD being a codename - so the problem will 'go away'.

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kyledrake
This is great! A good way for beginners to get their feet wet with OSM.

I'm sure they'll add a lot of improvements eventually, but if you're looking
for a more feature complete, more polished OSM editor in the interim, take a
look at the ArcGIS OSM editor:
<http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/extensions/openstreetmap>

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lxbarth
JOSM is right now the most popular editor in OSM. It's desktop software and
very powerful. JOSM is very much a power user tool where iD is aiming for a
great experience for beginners and casual users.

<http://josm.openstreetmap.de/>

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bcks
It runs on Node.js and is open source, too: <https://github.com/systemed/iD/>

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yellowbkpk
I think you're seeing package.json and leaping to Node.js. I think they use
the Node package management to help during build.

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bcks
My bad. It also mentions node as a test harness:
<https://github.com/systemed/iD/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md>

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bazzargh
Fantastic work. Love the tagging autocomplete - I find JOSM's icon menu
completely counterintuitive, you have to guess what classification the tag is
under before you can use it (and of course some things aren't there)

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rachbelaid
I'm glad to see that the grant from the Knight Foundation to Mapbox, helps OSM
is bringing something great. OSM really needed a new editor.

