StreetComplete: Easy to use editor of OpenStreetMap data
Very cool; I don&#x27;t work with OSM in my &quot;day job&quot; but took an interest early last spring.<p>It&#x27;s amazing how far things have progressed in the mapping space.  I think back to my first &quot;serial-port attached&quot; Magellin GPS device that only worked plugged into a laptop and stored seriously outdated maps on a CD-ROM.  Taking just the advances since the first time I saw a &quot;Google Earth-like Product&quot; (called Microsoft TerraServer[1]) to Earth, Maps, and OpenStreetMap and it really is mind-blowing how far the geo-* space has come.<p>I was (inappropriately) disappointed when I saw that it was a mobile app.  Of course it is.  It&#x27;s a mapping app.  I&#x27;d still want a laptop version, but then I dug into what they were trying to solve and the details of how their app works and, I&#x27;m genuinely impressed.  It appears you identified a real problem: lack of current, complete metadata on OSM[2] and gave me a way to update it semi-passively, or at least with the &quot;thing I have available to me right now&quot; while standing &quot;near the thing I&#x27;m trying to capture information about&quot;.  Since map data is relied upon for anything from leisure to outright safety, accuracy is really important, and the design[3] seems to nail ensuring that accuracy can be easily accomplished.<p>My interest stems from my purchasing of a OneWheel.  I put more miles on that than I did my car last year and I noticed that neither OSM, nor Google do very good with sidewalks.  They&#x27;ll get the ones that showed up well in the last satellite pass, provided there&#x27;s a road next to them, and they&#x27;ll get a lot of trails.  They miss a few <i>really</i> helpful things.  Where I live, most elementary&#x2F;middle schools are located within a cluster of subdivisions (often 1-2 miles from a main road).  In my neighborhood, the school is on the far side, and our subdivision borders two other neighborhoods, a large apartment complex and a trailer park.  To get from my home to a home in one of the three bordering subdivisions -- by car -- I will drive at least one mile and have to make a couple of ugly turns onto main roads -- our subdivision does not connect to the trailer park, apartment complex or the other bordering subdivision.<p>On foot, because of the elementary school, there are paved, fenced side-walks, meaning I can roll 1&#x2F;4 mile and reach any home in the other subdivisions.  Similarly, our neighborhood does not have a road leading out to one of the main streets that it borders because the residents feared it would be used as a bypass during high-traffic times to get from one popular main road to another <i>ridiculously busy</i> main road.  To solve this, they brought the road all the way to the parking lot of a McDonald&#x27;s and then built a large, brick, wall covering that whole side of the neighborhood.  McDonald&#x27;s takes the same amount of time to get to <i>by car</i> as it does <i>by onewheel</i> because at the end of that street, if you look really closely, there&#x27;s a second fence, and the home-owner bordering it put pavers down and knocked part of the wall out, so you ride right through to the parking lot, avoiding lights&#x2F;busy roads&#x2F;anything else -- and that main road has many retail businesses.<p>This pattern exists in almost every subdivision in my township, and the schools as side-walk nexus points connecting neighborhoods is state-wide (it allows for more students to walk, less busing [mandatory through most of my state]), but I&#x27;ve had to add each one to OSM, myself -- and I&#x27;m happy to do it, except that the online map editor, as amazing as it is, lands in on the &quot;intimidating&quot; side, resource-heavy [expected] and just generally not as pleasant as I wish it were.  I run Linux and last I looked, that was the best options of the choices I could get working (easily, anyway) with my current configuration.<p>Does anyone have any <i>non-Android</i> OSM map editor recommendations?  Or even any mobile versions that are particularly pleasant for adding the kinds of paths I&#x27;ve described?  And hey, if you know of any good source data for discovering those paths?  For instance, I have a link bookmarked around here that takes me to a heatmap produced using the phones of people who have a particular biking app installed and have enabled public logging.  It was super-useful in finding trails that are seasonal&#x2F;hidden&#x2F;otherwise not well mapped.<p>[0] I&#x27;ve done a mess of things with Google Maps API a while back, but even in those cases it was <i>really simplistic sorts of things</i>.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Terraserver.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Terraserver.com</a><p>[2] Not a knock to OSM; to clarify, considering their largest alternative is ... Gooble ... it&#x27;s pretty amazing that even on the metadata side, OSM is more complete in many categories than Guh&#x27;Maps.<p>[3] I&#x27;m going on screen shots, I will be installing this in the afternoon but have not installed it, yet so if some of the things I like (or dislike) aren&#x27;t actually the way I think they are &quot;in the app&quot;, my apologies.