Vespucci, OsmAnd and OSMapTuner. The latter is brand new.

A good way to find areas that need improvements is to use the issues reported at http://www.mapdust.com/ Clearing these out for a state may help eliminate some user’s pet peave about the map in their area.

Looks great. Keep up the good work.

Do you mean advertisements in the OSM blogs, or in the OSM data itself?

I have had some contact with abrasive contributors, but I find that for the most part they are few and far between. IMO they are mostly ignorable.
As Richard says, the important thing is that you find a project that you enjoy working in, and that enjoys having you around. However, it is near impossible to find a project that doesn't have at least one "that guy." In a community as large as this there's bound to be a few more than just one.
I think a code of conduct published somewhere would be helpful; something we could point people to when they begin getting out of line.

I use my phone to take pictures of things. I can't always remember the name of this or the value of that. My phone also geotags the picture so I know exactly where I was gathering that information. If you have a camera or picture phone this may be useful for you too.
You've go the bug now. No need for a cure.

Mark your location in your profile and then at osm.org/user/Moseme it should show user's near you. Find users in your area that have recent map edits.

Richard ++

We look forward to your contributions.

This is great news. I close far more MapDust bugs than I do fix them because by far most are invalid. They are usually "Other" with a description like "AKFUYL" A satellite view shows no obvious errors in the map.

OSMAnd can download the vector data and draw them on demand for offline use. It also includes navigation.

There is no such thing as having changes rejected. Once you save those changes, they are committed to the database. As soon as the tile renderer gets to it, those changes will be 100% live, comments or not.

I only look at Google imagery to compare works. Sometimes I'm curious how others decided to map something interesting.
If I see something on the other maps that would spark me to change my OSM maps, then I got visit that site personally to verify in person that what I'm mapping is current, and so that I ultimately end up building the final map based on my personal work, not on someone else's proprietary work.
On that note, I've found errors in professional maps, such as street names, that if I would have copied over, would have not only been infringement, but would have been adding an error into our free database.

I've never heard the word "pitch", here in the US, to mean anything more than to toss something at someone, like pitching a ball, or a sales pitch. I've never heard of a basketball court, or even a baseball field, for that matter, referred to as a pitch. I find the leisure=pitch un-intuitive as well.

Mapping is a great way to add another layer of awesomeness to hiking. It really forces you to pay more attention to the details of your area and memorize them so that you can then go home and add them to the map.

I would definitely find such a tool very useful. I've been going along my city and renaming the streets as appropriate. If I had a tool that would list out each way with a highway key and a suggested new name that I could just mass approve, that would be exceptionally helpful for me.

You can use JOSM (http://josm.openstreetmap.de/) to download map areas on your laptop or netbook for offline use and offline mapping.

Welcome to open mapping!

The accuracy of the bing imagery where I live (South-East USA) is quite good. I tested this by aligning roads with the Bing imagery. I then used OsmAnd on my Android-powered phone to see how close me standing on these roads looked on the map. After checking various times I determined that the Bing imagery was close enough that one would need a very expensive GPS device to find any error. As far as it goes for one using the maps to get around in any reasonable scenario, it is good enough.

Thanks olejorgenb. I noticed this in my mapping. I tried calibrating the images with my GPS, but I found that I can walk the same exact sidewalks multiple times and each time the alignment from my GPS can vary greatly.
I find Bings alignment issues to be mostly ignorable in real-world uses. If I map a road using the alignment at one zoom-level or another, when I use my OSM on my Android device along that road the difference in alignment is negligible.