Ahoy-hoy As promised …
I've decided to compile some notes now that I've used Merk for a few months now. I'm happy to log these as trac tickets as you see fit. Mostly they relate to the interface and my expectations (since that's all I have given the minimal documentation). You may decide I'm a strange user and not an especially typical one. :~) * this one has been mentioned since I first observed it. Large relations (coverage-wise) are almost impossible to work with using the interface. Further, simply selecting a relation with many members seems slow. Thankfully, it's already been well described, so my contribution is a suggestion for an alternate interface: how about parallel/redundant text-based controls? One could allow selection by ID. Just in case I'm having trouble selecting any object, why not allow me to input its ID? [1] Another control or menu item could be visible on the selection of an object. It would allow users to add the selected object(s) to the specified relation ID (a picklist of recently edited relations with their names could be provided to aid recall). * FIXED: why does the view area scale back when I use "download more"? (thanks again, Yves) [2] * I think the task labels "download" and "download more" could be rethought. They confused me at first and I suspect confuse most newbies. Maybe something like "fetch area" and "reveal more data"? They suck, too, but they have the right meaning. "Change viewport" and "Retrieve viewport data"?? * further on that, I use "download more", more frequently than "download", but it has a more difficult keyboard shortcut (^-Shift-D vs ^-d). It's a problem to change the interface like this suddenly, but can we think about how to address this over time? * the column widths in the tag editing control can be resized but don't stick. That would be nice if they would. * if I have object(s) selected, I lose this when I use "download more" * it would also be nice to select multiple rows in the tag data control and delete them. It seems to me I have to select and delete each key/value pair separately. This is something I often have to do with GPX waypoints that I make into proper OSM nodes. There might also be other operations users want to do with multiple tags. * when I get 412 Precondition Failed (etc., perhaps other API errors), can I find out more specific info? For example: which object caused the API error? which objects have been affected (because usually my upload partially succeeds)? It seems the API doesn't supply this level of help, though, so maybe that's a request for the API to provide richer feedback. * when I change the role of members in the tag data cells for relations, the change does not seem to show in the cell until it's scrolled. Some little glitch in the UI. * data cells for relation members do not behave the same way as data cells for object tags when I use the TAB key. When I am in the last column of the tagging data cell row, I can tab to the next row. I cannot do this for relation members. I'm using a build I made from 0.13-SVN (revision 13023). After Yves' recent changes, I'm looking forward to building again! Thanks to everyone who's listening to users and actively developing. Cheers 1. http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/merkaartor/2009-January/001032.html 2. http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/merkaartor/2009-January/001052.html _______________________________________________ Merkaartor mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/merkaartor
