Mobile AND offline

[karlcow]

In the process of editing OpenStreetMap, being on site is wonderful. It helps to give feedback with a very short loop about the immediate environment. An issue is that the current editing tools are not very good for matching these two goals at the same time:

1. Editing on Mobile (be phone or tablet) with a fatty finger on a small screen. It needs tools with magnified a bit like precision positioning when fixing text.
2. Offline. This is key. You should not have to be connected to be able to edit the map. Everything could be buffered and exported later when you reach a network. The background tiles should be imported when online then used when needed offline.

If these two features are met it would be very cool. It's indeed hard. I guess sync issues, precisions, number of downloadable tiles in appcache, etc.

[tmcw]

Thanks - there are definitely big goals in the project. I'm testing intermittently with mobile devices to make sure this works at least slowly on iPhones & iPads, with android testing later on.

Offline will be harder to do - offline js/html maps are almost nonexistent, much less offline-capable editors, and accepting big gaps in network connection increases the chance for commit conflicts, which will be difficult to resolve.

I'll split this ticket into another one, for offline testing - #127

[lxbarth]

@tmcw - could iD for mobile be easier realized within a framework like phonegap?

[systemed]

I'm not entirely sure that iD should try to be the answer to offline editing. We do want it to be usable on mobile devices, of course (which is a serious failing in P2 right now).

But actually editing on the move, which is when you need offline storage, requires a different set of tools. Less editing, more surveying/"notes". Walking Papers without the paper, if you like. You just want to quickly open your phone, mark "café here" and tap in a name, and that's it. Or you want to walk along a currently-unmapped path and have your track recorded for later use. I'd envisage this is better served by an OpenStreetMap-branded app - perhaps with good integration with iD and other editors - than by iD itself.

[lxbarth]

But actually editing on the move, which is when you need offline storage, requires a different set of tools.

I follow. Maybe the question is more what offline editing tools the iD infrastructure could facilitate. I. e. how hard would it be to write a data collection tool using some of iD's bits and pieces? E. g. for collecting building properties like HOT does it in Indonesia.

[tmcw]

I. e. how hard would it be to write a data collection tool using some of iD's bits and pieces? E. g. for collecting building properties like HOT does it in Indonesia.

Quite easy, I've pulled together this single-purpose editor to demo the sign-on process & basic flow.

Though to be clear, PhoneGap's utility is limited: it'll help with offline, but it's HTML/JS for everything else. I'm not sure if it'll be viable for a GPS track recorder, since it basically supports the existing geolocation API, and I'd assume that the existing gps apps do some tricks to preserve battery life.

[tmcw]

Okay, this is encapsulated in other tickets.

[jerel]

I realize this is a closed issue... just thought I'd drop in to say that I've been doing a bit of work with geolocation on mobile Android using the browser and Phonegap (html5 only, no phonegap api). I use a websocket for communication and send coordinate information every second when moving and less often when stopped. I just did a test where I was tracking for an hour while driving through good to poor cell coverage. The battery usage appears to be similar to the drain that talking on the phone would be.

If the device gets its network connectivity via a mobile wifi hotspot or isn't connected at all the GPS part doesn't seem to be much drain so GPS tracks could be saved in localStorage very efficiently. Just thought I'd mention it as I think mobile geolocation has lots of potential in mapping, even if it's not the full version of iD

[mikelmaron]

Offline will be harder to do - offline js/html maps are almost nonexistent, much less offline-capable editors, and
accepting big gaps in network connection increases the chance for commit conflicts, which will be difficult to
resolve.

Basically JOSM currently operates this way. You can save locally a chunk of OSM data, and work on it, and conflicts sometimes happen, and it's a mess, but that's the price.

Having a more user friendly starting alternative for editing OSM in tough environments is definitely needed. What would it take for iD to do this?

[tmcw]

What would it take for iD to do this?

Time :). There are no 'serious' blockers to this being a semi-offline app like gmail-offline, but issues like conflict detection #1053 are just going to need some real hacking. Maybe if another interested group wants to push on this we could parallelize both this work + maintaining-osm-and-browsers work.

[mikelmaron]

How much time by another group, can you estimate? There are ways to get support for this sort of thing, but need to know the scope. For instance, HOT put out this "Tech Challenge" yesterday: http://hot.openstreetmap.org/hot_tech_challenge_visual_tag_chooser