upvote
Every Door is definitely one of the easier ones and I like it but dang I wish the dev could get more funding to make it a nicer UX. Between the glitchy raster tiles and need to click load data all the time I feel it gets tiring fast.

I've considered building a separate app that's similar but oriented around the idea of using voice of pictures to update things (with AI extracting and formatting the data for you to review). But alas making yet another tool isnt ideal.

reply
Isn’t that a door (haha) opened by our supreme new AI coding overlords: that now it’s possible to take the Every Door source code (it’s on Github), and throw it into a coding agent with the instruction to „improve <ux shortcoming of your choice> without breaking functionality“, and with some iterations and human validation that yes, the UX is now indeed better, play the changes back with a PR?
reply
UX is one of the things AI isn’t good at. You can ask it for specific changes but just “make it nicer” is unlikely to work.
reply
“Make it nicer” will lead to unpredictable and controversial changes, likely to clash with the project owner’s vision. The owner would be better off using the LLM as a collaborator, if anything, to decide where to take the design.

However, UX can also be improved by some simple heuristics that could be seen as mechanistic by the standards of modern LLMs.

Performance and responsiveness, for example, contribute to UX even when the UI remains fixed. I’d wager Fable-level LLMs could improve perf on most open-source GUIs by benchmarking typical use cases and progressively applying standard tricks like caching, buffering, batching network calls.

reply
That's real work and requires real skill. The parent comment example prompt just doesn't work.
reply
No but if you have specific asks like “make this resizable” “I should be able to drag and drop to combine” or “add a button on the top right to close” it’s quite good at directed changes
reply
I can improve the UI to my taste but if the maintainer doesn't have time/money to maintain a big ol vibe coded PR for some very opinionated change isn't going to do much.

That would appear to leave me with the choice of just using it for myself (lame) or I then have a public fork to maintain :(

If there's basically no shot of it getting up streamed I think I'd rather make something from scratch to suit my needs without the extras.

Anyway, I hope the AI overlords help us fund more maintainers soon!

reply
FYI LLMs are also very good at maintaining a fork ;)
reply
In a lot of areas the sidewalks and crosswalks aren't mapped even though they show up clearly on overhead imagery. I try to fill them in when I can, although this should probably be an AI task now.
reply
I highly suspect Apple and Google maps are auto tracing satellite images. Apple maps has perfect coverage of every road marking on their maps that exactly lines up to the satellite images.

I believe most consumers of OSM just discard data like buildings and crosswalks and layer on top auto traced data which has 100% coverage.

reply
It doesn't help that there are multiple ways to map sidewalks in OSM (as a property of the roads themselves, or as standalone paths parallel to the roads).

I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.

reply
There's usually a reasonably clear consensus within a region or country.

That's less true for niche stuff (vs stuff where two different ideas are in wide use), but there probably isn't all that much of it either.

One way to approach it is to not worry too much about it, consistency can come later.

reply
That's true, but the very feeling that I might be inputting things in a way that might have to be updated later kinda drained my motivation.

I do understand that even if does get replaced eventually, it still was useful for a while, and probably served as the basis for whatever came after.

But still. For whatever reason, in my brain, it just diminished whatever psychological reward I got from adding information to OSM, which is a shame.

reply
At least in urban areas I've seen it's almost always better to define the sidewalks separately. The routing for pedestrians is often significantly different than for vehicles. This matters when the data is fed into Strava or Garmin for running routes.
reply
Every Door is pretty cool but for iOS I prefer GoMaps more.
reply