> 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.
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.
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.
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.