Three years back I started sending welcome messages to new mappers on behalf of SOSM, using a simple tool chain based on the RSS feed of new mappers from Pascal Neis.

The message is not customised as from the beginning it was seen as a replacement for the welcome message that had gone away with the web site redesign. The text (in 4 languages, no Romansh version though) is designed to welcome the new contributor and give pointers to the resources available nationally.

Has it worked? Difficult to say, as the whole point was a replacement of something that existed before, we didn’t expect drastic change and we didn’t get it.

And, no, I’m not stopping :-)

Two weeks back I was invited to Wherecamp Berlin, on the one hand to participate in the opening panel and on the other to have a short talk on the state of indoor mapping, more about that later.

Naturally the foreseeable impact of self-driving vehicles and machine learning in general was the, obvious, main topic of the opening panel. But outside of “things are going to change” I’m not sure that there was any other conclusion from a couple of oldish men without crystal balls.

From an OpenStreetMap point of view it was encouraging to see so many OSM based projects and operations presenting at the event mingling with essentially all the big names in geo-business.

Stefan from GraphHopper presenting at Wherecamp Berlin.

From a bit of a nerdy view, the first day presentations from Qualcomm, Broadcom and Google on what we will likely be getting in the way of GNSS support in upcoming mobile phones was quite interesting.

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Einige Leser haben vielleicht einen leicht genervten Tweet von mir gesehen als ich diese Woche entdeckt habe, dass die Vernehmlassung über die Revision des VGWR an uns vorbeigegangen ist, ohne dass wir die Möglichkeit hatten unsere Meinung dazu anzubringen.

Um was geht es?

Das Gebäude- und Wohnungsregister ist ein schweizweiter Datensatz der sämtliche bewohnte Gebäude und Wohnungen in der Schweiz umfasst. Neben Merkmalen die für OpenStreetMap nicht interessant sind, enthalten die Daten auch einen vollständigen Adressdatensatz und zum Beispiel auch die Anzahl Stockwerke für jedes Gebäude. Die GWR Daten sind zwar nach der jetzigen Rechtslage nicht direkt in OSM nutzbar aber wir haben immerhin Zugriff auf einer daraus erzeugten Strassennamensliste den wir zur Qualitätskontrolle nutzen.

Aus den GWR-Daten generierte Adressen werden von SwissTopo auch auf map.admin.ch angeboten, auf welcher Rechtsgrundlage die Publikation beruht ist allerdings völlig unklar. Dies tangiert OSM insofern, dass in der Schweiz man keinen urheberrechtlichen Schutz so publizierter Daten erwarten kann, und der Nutzer somit auf magische Art und Weise wissen müsste, dass das aktuelle VGWR eine abschliessende Aufzählung der erlaubten Nutzungen enthält und diese Daten in keiner Art und Weise für OSM genützt werden dürfen. Eine ähnliche Problematik stellt sich auch mit öffentlich zugänglichen Datensätze dessen Nutzung im Geoinformationsgesetz geregelt wird, aber immerhin muss man da nicht ganz so obskure Kenntnisse der Rechtslage haben um sich richtig zu verhalten.

Was soll sich nun ändern?

Der definitiver Text des revidierten VGWR, der Anfangs 2017 in Kraft treten soll, ist nicht verfügbar, deshalb bezieht sich diese Analyse auf den für die Vernehmlassung verteilten Entwurf. Dieser regelt viel administratives neu, zum Teil aus föderalistischer Sicht durchaus nicht unproblematisch, und erweitert das GWR um die nicht bewohnten Gebäude. Relevant für OSM sind vor allem aber die folgenden Punkte:

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As at the begin of every new quarter since a couple of years, I’ve updated the Contributor Statistics on our wiki.

Naturally the most noticeable thing is the large jump in new users and active users starting in April 2016, which is naturally mainly due to new incoming edits from maps.me users. This is, on first principles, naturally not a bad thing, and annoyances due to bad edits aside, exposing more people to OSM is good.

What I have however noted in discussion is that the impact of the growth of the raw number of contributors is massively overestimated. For example the number of edits (not changesets) per month is essentially unchanged:

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Last week we released version 0.9.8 of Vespucci, see http://vespucci.io/help/en/0.9.8%20Release%20notes/ for what is new.

This was a bit earlier than expected and does not yet include the opening hours editor (but does include a form editor for conditional restrictions) because we couldn’t update the 0.9.7 version on googles play store any more.

The versions available from google and amazon have been updated, we are in contact with the person responsible for the F-DROID build but we cannot provide an ETA for release there yet.

As essentially every month (and as every month WeeklyOSM will ignore us) we’ve updated the current production (0.9.7 change log) and beta (0.9.8 change log) releases with some fixes and improvements.

Both APKs are available from github https://github.com/MarcusWolschon/osmeditor4android/releases signed with the same key as the versions distributed via googles play store so you can download and replace your existing installation without issues (you will have to, at least temporally, allow side loading).

The production version available via the play store will however, thanks to googles divine intervention, not be able to be updated till we release 0.9.8. It is however, besides github, available from Amazons app store .

Like a broken record (hmm can youngsters actually relate to that?), at the end of every quarter, I’ve updated the contributor statistics on our wiki.

As you may remember there was an unexplained big drop in December of last year, the new numbers show some recovery from that, but not to the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2015 levels.

We’re well on the way for the next Vespucci release, a rough list of what I’m working on can be found on github. Numerous changes have already been implemented, here I just want to touch on the most interesting one for now.

Long time users may remember when the tag editing UI looked like:

The image is from version 0.7.0 which dates back to 2011/2012 (before I even knew it existed), I haven’t been able to find older screen shots, but I suspect it looked similar in 2009 in the first version. Mid last year I refactored the tag editing code to support a multi-page view and lots of other improvements, resulting in:

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As every quarter I’ve updated the contributor stats here

osm.wiki/Stats#Contributor_statistics_reports

• ~580’000 contributors total to our map data
• ~163’000 contributors in 2015

The two most newsworthy points are likely that we manged to hit exactly 9999 new contributors in November and the large drop in new contributors in December (which is supported by pnormans recently published numbers too).

Yesterday evening the release version of Vespucci 0.9.7 hit the google and amazon app stores. While not quite as fast as I intended, we did manage to get this out just 5 months after the release of 0.9.6 in July, my expectation is that we will continue to increase the frequency of releases going forward.

The most user visible difference in 0.9.7 is the reworked Notes and “Bugs” support. This can now work offline and supports, besides OSM Notes, warning and error reports from OSMOSE. One of the nicer aspects is that you can “auto-download” Notes and OSMOSE data (this naturally requires that you are online) independently of OSM data proper and with two “clicks” inspect a report, download the element in question, zoom to its position and select it:

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For a long time I’ve been wanting to produce some numbers detailing the size and growth of our national contributor communities. While a lot of things are sort of assumed to be true for example that the D-A-CH region is by far the largest community we’ve been missing some hard numbers.

Given the awful weather this weekend I at last had some time to finish off what I had started on a couple of weeks back.

So that you can play around with the numbers yourself and have a look at what interests you I’ve dumped the output in to a LibreOffice spreadsheet.

Some interesting things that I produced for myself:

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UID 133:

osm.org/user/TimCorio/history#map=13/42.9408/-77.6196

It is a truism that software has bugs and while as a developer it would be nice to say that they are all somebodies else’s fault, but we are probably are all just as bad as each other with respect to slip-ups. In the case of Vespucci the additional complication is that we are dealing with at least 26 different Android versions and 100s of different devices, each with its own manufacturer tweaks to hard- and software.

So unluckily now and then you might experience a crash. I do have to say outside of provoked crashes and early dev builds I haven’t had one for ages, but then I use a relative mainstream device for mapping and don’t try to edit gigantic areas, The important thing is to either get the issue fixed, or at least find out how to avoid it in the future.

Those readers that have had the unpleasant experience know that post-crash you will be offered the chance to submit a crash report. We do this with ACRA http://www.acra.ch/ and store the reports on a private acralyser server. ACRA gives us a lot of information on the HW and SW configuration of the device, a short excerpt of the system logfile and a stacktrace indicating what the immediate cause of the crash was and where in the Vespucci or Android code it happened. It does not store any personal information of the user in question, in principle we could ask for an e-mail address, but I would prefer not to for data protection reasons. Note on the side: there are some situations in which we’ll produce a stack trace just to document an unusual situation, if you don’t get an additional warning in general there is no reason to be concerned.

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No, this is not news. Vespucci has had a tag-only mode since its original creation in 2009, however since the old very modal user interface hasn’t been the default UI after the work by Jan Schejbal in 2012 and the start of the 0.9 releases, it hasn’t really been easily accessible.

Starting with 0.9.6 tag editing only mode can be switched on with a long press on the lock icon.

vespucci can still be locked/unlocked with a normal single touch on the lock and a long touch will get you back to normal editing mode.

Now while I personally don’t quite see the utility of such a mode, users have asked for it and it is the only remains of the old modes that will survive in 0.9.7. In any case it is light years better than the many apps of different kinds that claim to offer simple editing but in general are survey apps on steroids that mess up existing data.

I’ll be missing this weeks hack weekend in London with the topic of “mobile development”, unluckily it turned out to be on the one weekend this year on which I really coudn’t find a way to attend. In any case I wanted to at least give an update on how far I’ve progressed with the work on vespucci 0.9.7 which is scheduled for release early in Q4.

From a development perspective I try to get stuff that involves major internal changes done as early as possible in the ramp up to a release, for the obvious reason that we then have enough time to find issues in completely new code.

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Now that 0.9.6 is out, my focus is, naturally, on the next version. Hopefully 0.9.7 wont take quite as long to be ready, I’m fairly optimistic that we will be able to hit the planned release time frame of end of September. The larger operations on the guts of the app have already happened and should have enough time to stabilize till then.

If you are interested in what is planned see https://github.com/MarcusWolschon/osmeditor4android/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+milestone%3A0.9.7 Two of the items have already progressed pretty far: putting the code in place for translating the presets and the integration of notification support.

The later was mainly written as a proof of concept early this year at the Karlsruhe hack weekend but needed some work to be really useful. Some images from Karlsruhe:

Alert on a watch (naturally works on phone too) from an error detected in the nearby OSM data

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In case you didn’t notice we have pushed 0.9.6 to the regular google play store. Release notes can be found on device and in the repository. There is likely to be a small maintenance release soon that will address a handful of minor issues.

If you do experience an issue or even a crash, please submit the crash dump if any and check our issue tracker for known issues and if appropriate open a new one. Vespucci supports a large number of different devices over a wide range of Android versions (2..2 to 5.1.1) and the issue you are expierencing maybe not be repeatable on other devices or circumstances. A post on the google play store does not get problems resolved.

In all the noise about MapBox’s Series B offering and their successful bid to replace MapQuest’s in house map rendering capability, it seems that our dear trade rags missed something.

Likely the most important medium term aspect of the successful bid is that it removed funding and support for a competing vector tile rendering stack that MQ was developing internally.

Anybody that has been following the developments knows that while open source and in principle freely available, the MapBox vector tile stack doesn’t work “out of the box” in any reasonable meaning of the words. It follows the trend of the bits and pieces of MapBox’s technology becoming increasingly more difficult to use in practice by the community. The other well known example is MapBox studio, the follow up to the widely independently used TileMill.

A recent article actually points to parts that are closed source, a not completly unexpected change of direction.

Now I think we all realize that it is just a matter of time till the open source community catches up on the vector tile front. This will address some of the issues the OSM community has been having with its map rendering and even the playing field a bit. But MapBox has clearly bought themselves some more breathing space for now.

As an experiment we have made the current release candidate available via the google play store beta program. This allows you to replace the release version from the play store with a pre-release version and back again.

To participate you need to:

• be signed up for our discussion group https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/osmeditor4android
• visit https://play.google.com/apps/testing/de.blau.android (at least for me this has only worked with a browser on a mobile device) and join the beta program
• you should then be able to access the beta version via the normal play store app

The underlying reason for trying this out is that we currently do not get enough feedback from the testing period and this should make it easier for users that don’t want to use alternative ways of installing apps to participate.

Simon

A release candidate of 0.9.6 is available https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9pKLmh8s1h8bFI5bGd4VnhYWkk&usp=sharing Note the “signed” APK is signed using the same key as used for the play store and should not need an uninstall if you are replacing a 0.9.5 install.

The only change that is forseen for release, outside off resolving any last minute issues, is inlcuding the release notes.

Simon