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:

One of the goals of that effort was to make extending the tag editing UI easier and that has now beared fruit in allowing a simple preset-driven form based editing interface to supplement the old key-value editing:

This might sound straightforward, however there is no guaranteed one-to-one matching of presets to OSM elements which may have attributes for multiple real-world objects tagged (finding the correct preset is key to determining the correct values for each tag). I’ve taken an iterative approach to addressing this by trying to find the best match, adding all tags that belong to that preset, then adding all tags from linked presets and then repeating this for the remaining tags and so on. So far the results look good.

There are still a couple of rough edges which need to be smoothed out, but I expect a test build with this feature to be available in a couple of days.

Update: first beta with new UI https://github.com/MarcusWolschon/osmeditor4android/releases/tag/0.9.8-beta-1