The last version of the 2.0 series has been released! Expect the new version 2.1 to appear on the main page in a week or so.
In the current version there were mostly bugfixes and some code cleanup, but finally I made another attempt to get displaying of place names better.
As you might have noticed on some zoom levels areas with many cities/towns are only huge blobs of red bullets and because of the collision detection of Mapnik the place names don't get printed. Now I clear the "label cache" after showing all bullets and therefore the place names finally get printed. See the example for Germany (left old image, right new image): On the Western part there is the "Ruhrgebiet" with many cities. As there are too many red bullets no names get printed. With the new version the label names can appear on top of the bullets.
Another change: Many Asian place names have the form "local name (engl. name)", e.g. "東京都 (Tokyo)". As OpenStreetBrowser writes the English name below the local name anyway (at least if there's enough space), the new version discardes the text in brackets (if it's the same as the English name). Here's an example from South Korea (also a good example for the change described in the previous paragraph):
I hope you like my improvements. I'm glad about feedback, bug reports and suggestions! Just comment on this post.