Tuning OpenStreetMap Editing: iD Editor 1.1

Mapbox
maps for developers
3 min readJun 6, 2013

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By John Firebaugh

Just in time for State of the Map US this weekend,
we’ve released a new version of the OpenStreetMap editor, iD version 1.1 beta.
From new UI refactoring, to workflow improvements, to performance tuning, this
release is ready for testing on our staging servers.

http://openstreetmap.us/iD/release/

As detailed in the roadmap,
the 1.1 release focuses on relations editing support and performance
improvements. We’ve also added significant functionality to the sidebar, which
is now persistent on the right side of the editor. Here is a more detailed
rundown of what’s new in iD 1.1.

Performance Improvements

As an advanced, web standards-based application, iD pushes the boundaries of
browser support for technologies like SVG, CSS transforms, and high-performance
JavaScript. In 1.1 we’ve worked hard on both iD’s own algorithms and its use of
web technologies to make the editing experience snappier, particularly in dense
urban areas.

In some cases, we’ve been able to make significant improvements. In others,
we’ve found ourselves limited by underlying browser performance bottlenecks,
particularly on Firefox. Fortunately, the Firefox developers are on the
case
, and if you edit
with the latest Firefox Nightly, you should see
significant improvements relative to Firefox stable releases. We’re
eager to see these and further improvements make their way into Firefox. Until
then, we recommend WebKit-based browsers for best performance.

Relation Editing

iD’s sidebar now displays relation
memberships.

You can add, edit, and remove members from a relation, or edit the parent
relations of a given feature.

To make relation editing more straightforward, we’ve added presets for common
types of relations.

Improved Sidebar

In iD 1.0, the sidebar on the right slides in and out depending on your
selection. This behavior sometimes got in the way, and the constant movement
was a contributor to sluggishness. In 1.1, we’ve eliminated the slide-in
behavior, trading a bit of map space in order to provide several new ways for
users to interact with map features.

By default, the sidebar shows a list of the features currently visible. You can
search by feature type or name to narrow down the list. Click a result to select
and edit the feature — a handy way to get to relations that otherwise are not
visible on the map.

Hover over a feature on the map and you’ll see a summary of its attributes.

Finally, when you’re ready to save your changes, you can continue that
interaction within the same sidebar — no more modal dialogs.

Read more about the new sidebar
design
on the MapBox blog.

Once these features are tested and stable, we’ll roll iD 1.1 out on
openstreetmap.org. Until then, please try
editing OpenStreetMap with iD 1.1 beta
on
the openstreetmap.us deployment and report any feedback on our issue
queue
.

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