I was referring to impressions of a person familiar with iD trying to use jOSM for the first time. It can be a bit overwhelming - different workflow, tons of settings and you are greeted with an empty screen. No data, no imagery, need to log in to osm.org etc. With iD I was taking all these things for granted.
ContinuousDownload does work well, indeed but being a plugin it is not the first thing a new user is looking into. By the way, I am not using it now - I found mapping “File: Download Data” to an easily accessible key more convenient. But that was after a few months of using jOSM and it only works as expected when “zoom to downloaded data” has been switched off, which is an “advanced” option.
Yes, and to certain extent that’s fine. In fact, it was the more advanced features that made me use jOSM for the first time - editing tags of multiple objects and split&merge tools. These operations were either impossible or cumbersome in iD. I started editing simpler objects in jOSM later, when I got tired of switching between iD and jOSM.
OpenStreetMap
Discussion
Comment from saintam1 on 17 April 2020 at 10:47
If you’re not a fan of triggering data downloads manually, have a look at osm.wiki/JOSM/Plugins/continuosDownload
Comment from ndrw6 on 17 April 2020 at 11:46
I was referring to impressions of a person familiar with iD trying to use jOSM for the first time. It can be a bit overwhelming - different workflow, tons of settings and you are greeted with an empty screen. No data, no imagery, need to log in to osm.org etc. With iD I was taking all these things for granted.
ContinuousDownload does work well, indeed but being a plugin it is not the first thing a new user is looking into. By the way, I am not using it now - I found mapping “File: Download Data” to an easily accessible key more convenient. But that was after a few months of using jOSM and it only works as expected when “zoom to downloaded data” has been switched off, which is an “advanced” option.
Comment from saintam1 on 17 April 2020 at 11:55
Ah, yes I see your point. Yeah JOSM has a steeper learning curve.
Comment from ndrw6 on 17 April 2020 at 12:32
Yes, and to certain extent that’s fine. In fact, it was the more advanced features that made me use jOSM for the first time - editing tags of multiple objects and split&merge tools. These operations were either impossible or cumbersome in iD. I started editing simpler objects in jOSM later, when I got tired of switching between iD and jOSM.