The one enlightening experience I had in the 2009ish timeframe is how incredibly easy it is to contribute valuable information to OSM.<p>Intuitively I would have assumed that this would be really difficult to do, but the tools OSM provides for editing are actually quite easy to use even for people with no clue like myself.<p>You don't even require accurate GPS hardware or anything. Knowledge of your surroundings combined with the (blurry, but available none the less) satellite imagery might already be enough for you to really do good.<p>In my case, I've added building numbers of my neighborhood, marked one-way roads, added a few gravel foot paths where they were missing and I knew where there because I walk on them on my commute and so on. All this required zero hardware nor actual knowledge in map making (also: The changes are still in unaltered, so I assume they weren't all bad).<p>Using a cheap GPS tracker and a bike I furthermore added a few small lakes and a small creek close to where I live. The GPS tracker was very helpful as the satellite imagery was (understandably) just showing forest, but biking around the lake a few times was really helpful in giving me the correct measurements.<p>All this was both a lot of fun and absolutely trivial to do. I highly recommend that you give this a shot on your end. I'm a person with zero experience in map making and yet I could <i>easily</i> contribute my part and I had an absolute blast doing it.<p>Also, if you are good with directions, this isn't limited to the places you live now - I've also added a lot of detail to the map around the place where I went to elementary school (yes. The environment has changed a bit, but that was a <i>great</i> opportunity to visit the place again).<p>Contributing to OSM is a very pleasant and fun experience.
Some of the most relaxing & satisfying things I have ever done with a computer was spending hours updating OSM from fresh satellite images.<p>It was giddying to discover that Bermuda had great satellite images, but zero mapping and then a few hours later you'd literally put a well-known place like Bermuda "on the map" by drawing in most of the main roads, airport and so on. Great to see that others have built on this with detailed information.<p>Very fond memories.
OSM has really evolved in some places. For the immediate vicinity of my home, OSM is a lot better than Google Maps or any other map I've looked at.<p>OSM even includes horse trails and bicycling routes that I can't find in any other map available online. Not even local, official maps.<p>The weakness in OSM still is that it's difficult to tell whether or not the maps are of good quality and up to date for a particular region.
Very nice idea and good visualization, although I'd have preferred a single "switch" button to quickly switch the whole view between 2007 and 2014.<p>While this demonstrates the huge progress of OSM, it is important to keep in mind that the hardest (and not so rewarding) part of the work is not to create the maps, <i>but to keep them up to date!</i><p>That's why it is important to keep supporting OSM.
I recently went abroad in Europe and because of the price of data roaming I decided to install the OsmAnd android app for navigation.<p>In Romania, Transylvania using instead of a map it was very good. Even the little dirt roads were there. I had three problems with the app. The navigation did not wanted to respect my setting for "prefer highways", we always tried to regenerate the route, "we are near, maybe now it will know". Seemed like it hated highways. The app felt very buggy, I know it is free, but froze a lot of times and has un-intuitive controls. For example if I wanted to add navigation to a target it sometimes used a location from yesterday or something totally unrelated. Asking a question "Do you want to keep the current route?" it sometimes keeps the current route, sometimes reverts back to a route before, sometimes even just shows where I was yesterday. Third is, searching is a PITA. Because a lot of house numbers are missing you can only input intersections, sometimes it works, sometimes not. Searching for POI-s is good (remember, it is offline), but a lot of things are missing. I found if I add favorites and want a route between them then that usually works. (I don't know how the app creators are related to OSM.)<p>Anyway, I recommend the app because it is valuable and usable if you don't have connection (and free if you use only 10 maps).<p>Recently I wanted to use a web based map in one of my project and I found it is very easy to use OSM with <a href="http://leafletjs.com/" rel="nofollow">http://leafletjs.com/</a>. It has some bugs (I couldn't get a "map loaded" event out of it, maybe it is just me) but overall I think it was easier to set up than a google map. The one thing I missed is the geocoding of addresses, it is not really reliable because of the missing house numbers, instead of OSM I used the google solution and they can work together flawlessly.<p>I am glad to see a free map solution gaining popularity. Where I live there are events for mapping. I think on Saturday there was an event for mapping accessible roads/buildings for disabled people and someone even added all the fire hydrants downtown.
The poor Comcast business connection that's hosting the 2007 tile data is really struggling with the traffic! Lots of retransmissions (caused by packet loss) by the looks of it, likely because his upstream is completely maxed out.
I really want to like OSM, but the default UI is really holding me back. Even with its limitations, Google maps looks great out of the box. Open Street Maps is downright ugly.<p>Aesthetics is a huge selling point, especially when used for business, and I can't help but think that its the factor that is holding OSM back from prime time.
I'm rather surprised that even North Korea is mapped quite extensively in OSM.(<a href="https://mvexel.github.io/thenandnow/#14/38.9911/125.7365" rel="nofollow">https://mvexel.github.io/thenandnow/#14/38.9911/125.7365</a>).<p>For a long time, North Korea was shown as a featureless area in google maps.
It's amazing how easy it is to improve these maps. I just searched for my small town, created an account and started editing. Added a few alleys/shortcuts and about half a dozen POI's in 5 minutes.<p>What is the best way to use OSM on mobile, specifically iPhone? I remember trying some apps before but I didn't like them. Is there anything as polished as the Apple/Google apps?
The difference on my island is huge :D<p><a href="https://mvexel.github.io/thenandnow/#12/-20.9850/55.4634" rel="nofollow">https://mvexel.github.io/thenandnow/#12/-20.9850/55.4634</a>
I still can't believe, that's my city, Rome: <a href="https://mvexel.github.io/thenandnow/#11/41.8974/12.4987" rel="nofollow">https://mvexel.github.io/thenandnow/#11/41.8974/12.4987</a>
I am truly amazed by the wonderful job which has been done by the community.
It's also interesting to see how much activity has been going on in the recent past - ITO World have maps that can show you OSM edits made in the last 90 days, and in the last 7 days. For instance, this map shows the last 90 days of edits around Y Combinator's head office:<p><a href="http://www.itoworld.com/map/127?lon=-122.06776&lat=37.38596&zoom=15" rel="nofollow">http://www.itoworld.com/map/127?lon=-122.06776&lat=37.38596&...</a>
FWIW, the maker of this (Martijn Exel) gave a talk on where to improve OSM last saturday in Seattle at the OSM 10th anniversary event. Slides from his talk are here: <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ey85IHqupj7aWxq92RzqHa2wzurFQLxJPg_wXIwrGyY/edit#slide=id.p" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ey85IHqupj7aWxq92Rzq...</a><p>Personally like his other tool, the OSM vs. US Census Tiger 'battlegrid' : <a href="http://184.73.220.107/battlegrid/#10/41.8941/-87.7753" rel="nofollow">http://184.73.220.107/battlegrid/#10/41.8941/-87.7753</a>
My last three addresses and all surrounding roads cannot be found on OSM. The streets are all there, they are just tagged incorrectly. With some help from the forum, I tried to correct the errors, but it never worked. Apparently there are 'broken relationships' that are beyond my ability to correct.<p><a href="http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=24177" rel="nofollow">http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=24177</a>
I feel like this is somewhat exaggerated... <a href="https://mvexel.github.io/thenandnow/#11/-34.9324/138.6289" rel="nofollow">https://mvexel.github.io/thenandnow/#11/-34.9324/138.6289</a>