MarcusWolschon / osmeditor4android

Vespucci is a OpenStreetMap editor for Android
http://vespucci.io
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Bookmark UI: separate from Location menu? #2597

Open mas90 opened 3 days ago

mas90 commented 3 days ago

I'm a new user of Vespucci (thanks for developing it!), with some experience of having edited OSM in other ways. I initially misunderstood the Bookmarks feature - my own fault really, and I should have read the documentation to understand it properly - but I thought I'd feed back how my misunderstanding arose, in case a small change to the UI might make it easier for new users like me to know what it does and when (not) to use it. If you think my issue entirely arose due to my own stupidity, feel free to just close this :)

The context: I was out walking in a mountainous area, and started mapping a footpath in a rather exposed and hazardous location. The footpath was entirely missing from OSM so I needed to build it (and some surrounding features) from scratch. Given I'm not yet particuarly comfortable with Vespucci but I know that tagging things properly in OSM takes time, I did not try to construct my changeset 'live' but just planned to record a GPX route, and add nodes/paths around it when I got back home.

The footpath condition and the nearby landscape were variable, changing every few metres in some cases, so I wanted to take frequent brief notes tagged with my location to refer back to.

So I found the Bookmarks feature, under the "Location" menu. As the menu icon is the standard GPS icon, and the other items in the same menu are about GPS locations (following my location, recording a GPX track, etc.), I assumed that Bookmarks would also be attached at my GPS location at the point when they were added. I know now that they are not; they just reflect the bounding box of the viewport (which may or may not be following my GPS location at any given time, as I zoom and pan, or just accidentally swipe the screen).

So I ended up writing a bunch of detailed notes about locations, but only realised when I got back home that some were not tagged with my actual location when I wrote them.

I now know I shouldn't have used bookmarks for this purpose (though I'm not sure what I should have used: map notes maybe?).

My suggestion: move the "Add bookmark" menu option outside of the "Location" menu, because it doesn't pertain to the current location and that would make it less likely to mislead a new user.

simonpoole commented 23 hours ago

I can understand where you are coming from, but on the other hand UI real estate is extremely limited in our case and we are already over extending the limits of what can reasonably be done given form factor and UI interaction limits.

My current take would be that we should simply rename things along the lines of "Bookmark area", but this needs some more thought.