Brian Lovin
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sydd

While I love OSM the layers are bad UX. Currently the main site ( https://www.openstreetmap.org ) displays 7 layers:

- Standard -- OK, lets say this the universal default. The name is a quite non-descriptive, why not call it roads? Or driving?

- CyclOSM -- Why not call it cycle map? This is some internal project name?

- Cycle map -- duplicate, why does it need 2?

- Transport map -- What kind of transport? Call it "Public Transport".

- Tracestrack Topo -- no idea what this means.

- OVPNKarte -- again no idea. Looks like another public transport map. Why does it need 2?

- Humanitarian -- Here I have really no idea. Is this for disaster relief personnel, so it displays hospitals and such?

PetitPrince

I agree the "what it is for" of each layer could be improved. Digging up the wiki [1], there's (I'm aggregating the content of "significance" and "uniqueness"table):

- Standard: "Attempts to do many things at once (Jack of all trades, master of none)"

- CyclOSM: "Contour lines. Cycle map. World coverage"

- Cycle Map: "Contour lines. "Focuses on bicycle features, shows bicycle routes"

- Transport Map: "Displays routes, and public transport. Roads are not most prominent feature."

- ÖPNVKarte: "Displays routes, and public transport. Roads are not most prominent feature."

- Humanitarian: "Focuses on the developing countries with an emphasis on features related to development and humanitarian work. Good contrasting style in terms of overall colour choices. Terrain shading. Many new/different icons (particularly for basic amenities in developing countries) and more nuanced surface track-type rendering. "

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_tile_layers

usrusr

OSM presentation configurations are a bit like Linux distributions (only much, much smaller): yes, having more than one causes a lot of seemingly avoidable mental load, but there is little doubt that the design by committee implied by a single version would be much worse.

junon

Give people the option to create, import and export their own on the official site, and a means for browsing a catalog of them. You can infer how good they are (and thus their ranking) by how many interactions are made with the map or something, or just use a rating system that can be done anonymously.

No design by committee, and no random, unclear layers for the average user.

usrusr

The map on osm.org is leaflet based, pre-rendered png tiles. Each theme is a huge global tile pyramid, and because they are osm and not some random osm redistributor they better have those pyramids refreshed quite frequently. No, you don't simply create a "themehub" platform on the side.

mtmail

https://mc.bbbike.org/mc/ allows to compare 250 map styles, up to 8 per page (selector is bottom right of page). I'd like to see the snow map, rail infrastructure and power infrastructure map (https://openinframap.org/) added but it'd be overwhelming.

aqwsde

"ÖPNV" (Öffentlicher PersonenNahVerkehr) is the German abbreviation for "public transport". And "Karte" <-> "map"

timeon

Default site is primary for mappers.

sdfghswe

Thanks for this. Turns out I'm not just stupid.

shpx

lmm

> Islands which are also states say the name of the island twice at certain zoom levels.

That seems correct and desirable? They're two distinct things that happen to coincide. Just like a street with a name might also be part (or the entirety) of a numbered route, and we'd want the map to show both.

lucideer

That seems correct in theory but it is inconsistent between islands - I suspect it's to do with adminstrative levels differing between different nations.

e.g. With the first example - Isle of Man - you won't see the same happen with either Great Britain or Ireland, nor with smaller adjacent islands. The labels font-sizes & zoom behaviour are also very different between Northern Ireland and Ireland - the UK having countries within a country and adding an extra admin level in the hierarchy. Isle of Man being a crown dependency could be a factor I guess, or something similar.

Ultimately this seems fine to me though: representing areas locally for each locality is by definition inconsistent.

Angostura

Great Britain isn’t the national name. It is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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hnben

can this issue be solved without introducing ambiguity?

hnben

I mean the first one

> Islands which are also states say the name of the island twice at certain zoom levels.

colordrops

Are these new problems or pre-existing problems?

kibwen

You can click the "layers" button on the side to see how it looks in other layers. For the Isle of Man, other layers only show the name once, or don't show it at all at that close of a zoom level.

shpx

Actually the standard layer also says "Isle of Man" twice at a certain zoom

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/54.1624/-4.5071

simonw

Nice. Here's a direct link to view San Francisco using Tracestack Topo: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/37.7846/-122.4304&laye...

stinos

Have been using https://opentopomap.org for this for a while, and depending on what you're looking for it still has some advantages: does show the numbers on all height lines (osm only does the 50m one in my area for some reason, leaving you to guess whether the next one is 40m or 60m since that is not always obvious - seems like a key thing for a topographic map), does show the house numbers.

aendruk

What’s the explanation for the Martian look at z≤8?

e.g. https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/40/-111&layers=P

And it looks like this is a proprietary fork of Carto? Its inclusion on the OSM website is essentially an advertisement?

pipe2devnull

If you zoom out all the way you can see color corresponds with elevation. Reddish is highish elevation.

lucb1e

View it on a 3D globe here: https://www.tracestrack.com/#features

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KronisLV

This is really cool!

Though I find myself looking for a provider of geocoding and navigation for a freelance project of mine.

I know that I could probably self-host OSRM and OpenMapTiles, but the hardware requirements make using a cloud service feel easier.

At the same time I can't really decide between something like Mapbox and MapTiler (or possibly even cheaper alternatives that I don't know about), since a lot of the APIs feel a bit vendor locked.

On the other hand, it's nice how many options there are, even though the industry feels like it's moving towards vector tiles which perform mich worse for me, albeit look better.

MaximilianEmel

Crosswalks still look the same as sidewalks :(

Freak_NL

The layer seems closed source, or at least not developed out in the open, so you can't easily file a bug I think.

jokoon

I love osm, but the raster generators are not well documented.

I want to just make my own raster map for a limited area and it's not trivial to do.

So the data is open, but the software is either not free or too hairy or poorly documented so you can pay them to use it.

It's still better than Google map.

arboles

Is this not good? (Genuine question if you tried it. I never used it, I just had it bookmarked because the README looked good.)

https://github.com/enzet/map-machine

GauntletWizard

This looks nice, unlike Google's recent decision to completely redo their colors to look like Apple's terrible, faded colors.

tornato7

In my parents' car, the screen doesn't exactly have high dynamic range, and for some reason Google Maps colors are white on white, impossible to tell where the streets are looking at the screen during the day.

wkat4242

That's Google design these days. White on light white on sightly darker white.

Apparently it's modern and people have thought about it. I guess those people wear sunglasses all day.

navane

I keep telling this at my Google maps when I use it as satnav in my car. I'm trying to count which right it is, but I don't see the side streets as they are white with a light grey border on off white. Infuriating. Give me my neon green, purple and black.

lucb1e

These situations are not the same btw. Not sure if you know, but this style was added as an option in the layers menu. You can use whatever style you like!

aqfamnzc

The reason they use such light, poor contrast colors is that the map is used as a background for things like business ads, the blue navigation line, etc. Yes in the process, it becomes useless as an actual map for looking at.

DavidKarlas

I just wish it displayed buildings at zoom 16(today at 17, while default OSM renderer at 15). And similar for addresses displayed currently at 19, I wish it was at 18, while OSM default renderer displays at 17.

shrx

For some reason, the Tracestrack Topo layer doesn't load for me in firefox.

rstarast

Same here, I get 403s from tile.tracestrack.com

Edit: I think it's due to referrer filtering. I can load the tiles fine if I pass 'Referer: https://www.openstreetmap.org', but Firefox sends 'Referer: tile.tracestrack.com'. Presumably that's a measure to preserve privacy, possibly due to some extension (though I've disabled various adblock, tracking protection things...)

lucb1e

What do you use to suppress the referer header?

For my job, I needed to know whether to dissuade a customer from using the referrer for CSRF protection. I looked for stats on how many people filter this but could find nothing at all. You're the first person I hear runs this in practice, so maybe I can find usage stats on the software you use. Secondarily, I'd be curious how often you run into trouble!

seabass-labrax

I block referrer headers on Firefox 102.15.1esr; although I use uBlock Origin, for the headers I just set 'network.http.sendRefererHeader' in about:config. There are very few occasions when things don't work. Perhaps once in a week's worth of browsing the Web I'll come across a Cloudflare site that doesn't like me, and these new OpenStreetMap tiles worked yesterday but don't today.

bmicraft

It's a feature of uMatrix that's enabled by default

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matchamatcha

Thanks, changing that setting in uMatrix worked for me.

mqus

Same for me, Firefox on Linux. Getting 403's

gerdesj

It does work for me FF/Linux.

Does this work?

    https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/50.9349/-2.6296&layers=P
You should end up with a view of a small town in South Somerset, UK.

mqus

Nope, grey Screen. But like another one commented, I also have the same referrer. I also saw that I somewhat locked down 3rd-party cookies and the tile request doesn't have any cookies. This might be another reason (I haven't checked if there should be a cookie there though)

nani8ot

Works on Firefox Android with uBO enabled.

lucb1e

Works in Firefox on Linux with uBO, Decentraleyes, Privacy Badger, from a German IP address if that makes a difference...

(Tacking more onto uBO reminds me of the dutch/german game where you start by saying "I go on holiday and bring... a book", then the next person has to repeat and tack on one item, and so on, until someone forgets an item. I couldn't quickly find if this exists in english.)

nani8ot

The game seems to exist in many countries/languages.

The reason I was including the extension was because these problems people have with websites usually com down to the extensions they use. At least I don't remember a site not working after opening it in private browsing or if that doesn't help a seperate browser with a different engine.

kiwijamo

Loads for me Firefox/Windows.

gerdesj

.. and me FF/Linux.

Parent might like to examine their extensions/network/life choices. I block a shit load of stuff and bizarrely a mapping system used and generated by millions of people just seems to work.

This didn't look very pretty but I still got the menus 8)

    $ links "https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/50.93675/-2.63421&layers=P"
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There's a new map style on OpenStreetMap.org - Hacker News