Yesterday was day 3 of the hackfest, and we of course spent our day working on MapOSMatic.
- Support for amenities in index has been added. Now, in addition to the streets, you have the location of the town hall, police station and other public buildings, the schools, universities and other education buildings, and the places of worship. More improvements are needed in this area (translation of headings, support for amenities represented by polygons, fix incorrect grouping), but the general infrastructure is in place.
- The main form to select the city has been further improved, with bug fixes, improved usability, etc. Said like this, it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but all this stuff is written in Javascript using the JQuery library and requires careful fine-tuning to be working. We easily spend a day on the same 20 lines of Javascript.
- The language selection has been improved, with all french-speaking countries and all english-speaking countries added (we’re waiting for your contributions for other languages). The list of languages available is now automatically reduced to the languages spoken in the country in which the selected city is. For multi-lingual countries like Belgium, we have no way to know if the selected city is in the french-speaking area, the dutch-speaking area or the german-speaking area. Therefore, it is up to the user to choose between these languages. This selection changes how the streets are sorted and the list of prefixes that we consider before sorting.
- The slippy map based on OpenLayers is now loaded only if bounding box mode is used. This allows a much quicker loading of the MapOSMatic homepage.
- We have improved our server infrastructure to regularly update the coast lines, which are coming from a difference source than the planet OSM xml file. It allowed to fix rendering problems in island where we had ugly coast lines. These informations are now updated once a week.
We’re now starting day 4 of the hackfest. We will soon send out a notification to beta-testers so that they can test all these new features and report their comments and bugs.