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It is always fascinating to see all the different places around the world where people work on the this project and how constantly the map is evolving and improving. There are a couple of wonderful tools already that visualise this constant buzzing of the map. Of cause there is the much viewed and cited A year of edits 2008 video, but that is unfortunately a bit outdated by now. There are also the Osmaware scripts, that generate a set of kml files with which you can see all the people and where they edit the map every day overlayed on Google Earth or any other kml viewer. If you want to be even more up to date, you can watch OSM Live, which shows you the edits rolling in in realtime (well, with a 5 minute delay) all over the world.

However, although I really like osmlive, it only shows you the edits on a global scale and you can't zoom in. As most of the edits still happen in a tiny part of the world called Europe, zooming in really would be good to see where the edits occur. So I went along and hacked together a little java program that basically takes the ideas of osmlive, but visualises the edits on a zoomable slippymap. The program automatically downloads the latest minutely diffs and shows all nodes that have been added (blue), modified (green) or deleted (red) on the map as they occure. As it uses the new minutely diffs, the delay should be down to about 1 minute now.

If anyone wants to try it out, you can find the program at http://gpsmid.sourceforge.net/misc/LiveEditMapViewerJ.jar. Although it isn't really "useful" it is fun watching the edits as they happen and zooming in on them. Especially, if you manage to catch a whole new village just appearing in front of your eyes. :-)

When out and about, I often notice a small detail here and there missing in the map such as a post box or atm and of cause I want to add it. But by the time I have finished what ever I was actually doing (these aren't mapping trips after all) and could enter the POIs I have frequently forgotten about them again :-(. Anyone else has the same issue? So I have always wanted to be able to just take out my phone press a few buttons and the poi is in the database, after which I don't have to worry about it anymore.

Well, I have last week finally gotten around to start adding an on-the-go POI editor to GpsMid, an app to display OpenStreetMaps on any java enabled phone. It isn't much yet, and still needs quite a bit of work, but definitely is starting to become useful, at least to me. So I though I'd blog about it here, as others might find it useful too and I would be interested to hear feedback of what would make this feature most useful to others.

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