Six days into my work on OSM. I'm beginning to get a pretty good feel for how to work Potlatch. I've found I like the simplicity of the Potlatch tool versus JOSM. However, I'm finding that Potlatch has some distinct limitations. Hopefully, I'll continue to learn as to tool continues to grow.

Technically, I've been part of the community for almost a year. However, I never got around to learning enough to try to upload some data. My recent experiences trying to find a decent commercial mapping product led me to consider OSM again. Basically what I learned was that the leading product on the consumer market had really big problems, like out of date map information, user interface issues, and discontinued support for mobile devices. This product is also acknowledged by reviewers as the best of the bunch! Surely a dedicated open source community could do better.

I live in a vast, uncharted wasteland known as Ohio, at least as far as OSM is concerned. There are a few major roads charted (maybe half a dozen) over the entire state. It is possible that I am the first Ohio resident to contribute to the project!

My first general impression of OSM is that it is a project with a firm foundation, but a weak user experience. I've been working on it for about a week, and I'm just starting to feel comfortable with parts of the process.

I've made a few mistakes along the way. For example, I recorded a new track one day, converted it, uploaded it, and waited for it to appear. The points never showed up, even after the upload was accepted. It was a few days before I realized that I had mixed up file names in the conversion process and managed to upload a duplicate of a previous track file instead of my new one.

Nevertheless, there are a number of quirks in the system. For example, I am using Vito Navigator II on my PDA. The track files are saved as waypoints. I can convert with GPSbabel, but I had to learn through experimentation that I have to convert all waypoints to tracks or the resulting .gpx file is rejected as having 0 tracks. It took me several uploads before I figured it out.

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