Finally, I re-implemented a feature of the old OpenStreetBrowser which I was especially proud of (although it's rather easy to implement): The Wikipedia integration.

Many OpenStreetMap features have links to Wikipedia articles and images. In the detailed view, OpenStreetBrowser will show the first paragraph and the first image of this article - in your preferred language (to be exact, the "data" language - you can set it in the Options). It loads the list of availble translations from the Wikipedia article itself.

Also, if any images can be found, these will be displayed.

A requested feature: Permalinks. OpenStreetBrowser URLs now encode the current map location, opened categories and - of course - the currently viewed map object. Now it's easy to share information to others.

Popups of map features are now much more detailed. A lot of tags (like website, contact email, opening_hours, ...) are parsed, regardless of their category. If a tag is not set, nothing will be shown in the popup. Some information though (like the "cuisine" tag in the screenshot) are not generally parsed, but are restricted to the category.

Example of a gastro object:

Before this improvement

After this improvement

If you want to see how this works, check the file openstreetbrowser-categories-main/popupBody.html. There's also a openstreetbrowser-categories-main/detailsBody.html for the information in the sidebar. Pull requests (or feature suggestions) for improvements and extensions are very welcome!

The files use the TwigJS template language.

This change is heavily inspired by Bexhill-OSM.

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:

• Categories source

Have fun!

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.

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!