Long-standing issues

[Prateek]

Lately I have been using MapMaker after a longish gap. I guess the
bugs and annoyances in MapMaker and how posting them here did not lead
to them being fixed was part of the reason for the gap.

It's disappointing to see that after so many months, MapMaker still
has issues with short road segments, still says "added road segment is
too short or too long" when I haven't added any segment, still asks me
whether I want to extend Unnamed Road or Unnamed Road, still provides
the same old primitive tools for manipulating roads and intersections
(as opposed to "power tools" to freely manipulate the road graph and
join and split roads), still gives bad data errors with poorly phrased
error messages, still has some irritating panning during the edit
process, still has huge (well, I'm on a 1280 x 800 screen) white
balloons covering the map when there's the sidebar space available,
still nags me with "user has increased their rate of edits", still
does not allow selecting and manipulating multiple features at once,
still tells me that my edit could not be completed because some road
section needed for it is waiting for moderation without pointing out
which road section this is, still shows very thick blue lines and
white squares for roads which make smooth curves a mess, still shows
poor messy output for a while after a road edit (overlaying the edited
state of the feature on top of the now-outdated tile), still has not
clarified roads and road sections properly in the UI ("edit entire
road section"?), still does not correctly handle "entire road section"
edits, still has broken history on user profile pages, still wastes a
significant amount of screen real estate on the top of the page, still
has no sandbox area for testing, still automatically marks apartment
buildings/hostels/guest houses as "BUSINESS", still has no means of
grouping features or having a hierarchy of features, still needs an
explicit "find" or "browse" before editing, still makes me wait for a
"save" to be processed before I can proceed, .....

Even unpaid open source developers would probably have fixed many of
these issues in a few months!

[Vaseekaran]

Hi,

 

I agree with many of the points listed by Prateek.

 

I would like Mapmaker to allow editing a feature even if another section is under moderation. I have missed many edits, as when I wanted to edit a feature mapmaker didnt allow and lost track of the edit as I didnt know when the modration was over for that section.

 

Is it a way to give alerts on such cases?

 

 

Also Is there a feature to rotate the maps as required, as many a time we have to take 2-3 pages of printouts where as it would have fit into on page if only you had the provision to rotate the maps to the desired level.

 

If this enhancement is listed in the issue tracker, can someone give the reference so that I can vote for the same.

 

Regards,

 

Vasee

--
John Vaseekaran
+919841297993 / +6584024507

[Map Maker Guide]

Hi Prateek,
Good to see you back at the forum after a long time! Welcome back :)
As for the questions you have raised we understand and appreciate your
concerns. All the points that you have raised are well-founded and
will lead to a great mapping experience. At this time I would like to
point out that we do have some major changes on the anvil that we hope
to roll out soon. I will definitely post back to the group when I have
some updates.

Thanks for your continued support while we work towards making Map
Maker better.

Regards,
Map Maker Guide.

[Map Maker Guide]

Hi Vasee,
We do not have an alert sent out when a feature is approved without
any comments. However, the ability to edit pending features has been
raised here: http://code.google.com/p/google-mapmaker/issues/detail?id=27

The ability to rotate the map has not been raised. Please see the
following page to get started with posting issues on the Issue
Tracker : http://code.google.com/p/google-mapmaker/

Thanks & Regards,
Map Maker Guide.

[Prateek]

Great. Looking forward to the updates.

[Vaseekaran]

Hi

 

Thanks for the quickest response. I will raise the rotate map feature.

 

Is there any way we can delete an entire road.

 

For example there are 2 roads (Kaveri Street/ South Sectore 2nd Street, and South Sector 4th street) given in the below link which need to be changed. Actually these road consists of 3 or 4 sections each, having different street names. So now when I want to delete the roads and recreate them. I have to delete the sections one by one wait for moderation and delete the next section. So for changing one road it takes atleast 4-10 days depending on the no of sections to be renamed.

 

http://www.google.com/mapmaker?gw=55&t=h&dtab=overview&ll=12.985228,80.201976&spn=0.002682,0.005085&z=18

Also when I delete a section in the middle of an entire road length, is it not possible to break the road into 2 parts which are independant? At least that will help in corrections....

 

 

 

These kind of handicaps applies a brake in the efforts to clean up data and adds to the frustration.

 

 

Suggestion:

 

When someone is new to the mapmaker, why not you ask them to signup exclusively to make edits and before signing up they are given some basic guidlines in creating roads and naming them and also on editing existing roads. Without having read it they should not be allowed to make edits.

 

I also did some mistakes initially, since i also didnot go through the literature initially.

 

I notice many of the issues involved in corrections are due to the reason, that people create long roads without knowing whether it consists of many sections with different names or they create the roads as "unnamed" ones. But when it comes to naming them, you face that the long road in reality is a combination of small roads with different names and you are not in a position to edit.

 

 

But this problem can in a way get resolved, if the requsted change to make edits to sections of a long road comes in to effect. Eagerly waiting for the DDay when this feature will be published

 

regards