OpenStreetMap
i thought about writing my first iphone app; a little tagging app for a start. but after looking at the rudimentary API for fetching data, i think i'll wait until version 1.0. it's unreasonable for a mobile user to download 200k of data for a small bbox just to get a handful of nodes and ways (buildings) tagged with amenity=bar.
XAPI is no alternative. it doesn't offer enough features either. on the other hand it's not reachable most of the time anyway.
Discussion
Comment from Harry Wood on 14 January 2011 at 01:43
I wouldn't recommend writing an OpenStreetMap editor app as your first iPhone app. An OpenStreetMap editor is a pretty complicated thing. You have to consider authenticating, bundling edits into changsets, dealing with conflicts etc, and yes... downloading whole bboxs of sometimes very complexly interlinked data. Although the designers and developers of the OpenStreetMap API would like to encourage people to develop new editors, it's not really an easy afternoon programming exercise.
You might want to check out the OpenStreetBugs API as a way of allowing simple contributions.
A lot of mobile developers have created apps backed onto their own server-side APIs, with OpenStreetMap data fed in as planet downloads. This enables you to tackle problems like low-bandwidth map bbox transfers and data filtering by tag, features which have so far been left out of the main API.
Comment from wieland on 14 January 2011 at 07:31
Do you look for an iPhone app? Do you know about iLOE osm.wiki/ILOE ? I used it several times.
But just for adding nodes like hotels, restaurants, ... (POI).
Normally I start with a search using iLOS osm.wiki/ILOS
to see, which hotels are already mapped near.
I wrote the database backend for iLOS using the planet-files and daily-changes from http://planet.openstreetmap.org/daily/
Comment from amm on 14 January 2011 at 09:13
@Harry. Depending on what you do, it isn't all that bad to write a very basic editor. For example I created a basic POI collector into GpsMid quite quickly. You basically just need to (de)serialise a bit of XML and send it to a website. You can also get and send individual objects to the API. And as long as the API still supports basic HTTP auth, that part isn't difficult either.
However, you should be well aware of what limitations such a simple editor might have and what problems it may cause if it doesn't support the full complexity of the OSM data.
Comment from flaimo on 14 January 2011 at 09:20
if you use iLOE you need to know the name and possible values of tags which is not very user friendly. it's something for people who are already mappers and know their way around. i had something smaller in mind for people who are not mapping all the time and therefore don't know all the tags listed in the wiki. also i see it as an exercise for me for learning objective-c.
Comment from booo on 14 January 2011 at 12:43
There is an ongoing process of rewriting the xapi. If you have any feature requests please let us know.
Comment from compdude on 14 January 2011 at 17:02
Wow, i'm surprised you'd be wanting to write an OSM editor for your first iPhone app. THat sounds complicated, mainly because there's a lot of features in OSM. Maybe just start with something simple and gradually add more and more features.
Comment from flaimo on 14 January 2011 at 19:15
i will add my thoughts to the xapi wiki discussion page…
Comment from wieland on 14 January 2011 at 22:42
In iLOE you can choose from a list of common keys like name, amenity, leisure, addr:street and for amenity and leisure you can choose from a list of values.
iLOE tries to be simple, you can only edit nodes.
Maybe invest 1$ and try it and decide what to do different or same.
A very simple editor could use the openstreetbugs.org-api. But that is not really an osm-editor.
I don't want to stop you from learning objectiv-C :-)