blog.openstreetbrowser.org

Incredible! OpenStreetBrowser is back. Not all categories have been ported to the new system yet, but many are already working :-) It uses Overpass API as backend (per default overpass-api.de) and Leaflet as frontend. It shares a lot of code with my public transport map.

• OpenStreetBrowser

If you want to have a look at the code, here are the sources:

• OpenStreetBrowser code
• Categories source

Have fun!

This is a sad moment. OpenStreetBrowser is no more. Unfortunately I have to admit, that my time is limited and that I can't support it any longer. Main reason is, that I now have two adorable children which use up most of my leisure time. Also, my last attempt to save OpenStreetBrowser didn't work out (the category system didn't work for the last 7 months or longer) - it was not performant enough. The code base is a big mess, with having tried many different approaches - better not look at it :-) Also it cost me quite some money, as I'd rented a powerful server.

One of my servers crashed due to a broken harddisk, therefore you have to live with a very reduced version of OpenStreetBrowser - there are no categories right now. You may still enjoy the background rendering ;)

I'm currently in the process of building a new base for the OpenStreetBrowser: Categories written in MapCSS, using Overpass API as database and pgmapcss for processing. Also for displaying, the new OpenLayers ol3 will be used.

The rewrite is already quite advanced, but still I need another month or two until the version can go online.

Stay tuned!

Regular users of OpenStreetBrowser might have noticed, that there were subtle changes to the background map. This is due to a rewrite of the style sheet using MapCSS and a completely new rendering backend using pgmapcss 0.9 (a library which I developed during the last year) and Mapnik 3.0.

On April 1st, 2012 the database updates stopped, as the transition phase for OpenStreetMap's new ODbL license started. This made a re-import of the database necessary, which has been finished last weekend. Therefore up-to-date data is finally available in the categories and on the basemap (nearly, currently the database lacks a couple of hours behind OpenStreetMap updates). The public transport overlay still needs to be updated, therefore rendering will appear at a later time. Please note that new basemap tiles will be rendered _after_ being visited, therefore old renderings appear.

Less than a week has passed, and already there are some exciting updates to OpenStreetBrowser. I invested some time to optimize for small screens (like smartphones) and touchscreens (as there are no 'mouseover' events). I hope it's usable on your phone / tablet / whatever too :) If you find bugs or have suggestions for improvements, please comment on this post, or use the OSM Wiki.

This update brings improved markers, as they have an ID encoding their position; therefore URLs containing markers can be sent to other browser. There was also some bugfixing, notable with the search: Searches containing spaces or special characters were encoding wrongly and didn't work. There were also some translation updates to el, et and ro. Thanks for your contribution!

This new version should make it easier to run an own installation of OpenStreetBrowser, with a lot of bugfixes on the server side. But still, the server daemon needs better error handling. There were also some language updates, notably Czech and Estonian.

A long time has passed since version 2.1 (9 months) when the last bigger improvements were published. I started a lot of improvements in the last couple of months, finally I had time to consolidate and polish them (oder at least some of them). If everything is working as expected only time will show - you can help me solve them by reporting bugs. Changes include: Keyboard Shortcuts, Grid Overlay, GPS Toolbox, URLs without #, OpenLayers 2.12 and some improvements on the server side.

Long story short: No new OpenStreetMap-data until autumn. Why? Read the long story :) And language updates: A new language - Portugese (Brazil) - and updates to Romanian and Czech.