Hi guys,
I have noticed the addition of “Farmland” throughout the entire map.
I wish you would reconsider this for several reasons. The great advantage of this map has always been the ability to read it “ on the fly” even on bright sunny days and off-road conditions.
I find the color of ‘Farmland’ to be too dominant and dark, especially when adjacent to forests, which makes it harder to distinguish between the two, not to mention “Green KKL” tracks on green farmland background.
The maps looks – in my opinion - overly clustered this way which is the opposite of what we would consider easy to read map.
its great that you found the way to discussion board and congratulations for your first posting.
I understand your 2 cents and as I have added a lot of farmland in the last days you probably mean myself by this posting
But there is one rule in Openstreetmap. Never map for a renderer.
Meaning that I’m adding on the ground features that are really existing.
So I’m not adding them to be displayed in green, brown or anything else.
If you are using mapnik (the most common renderer that is also used on openstreetmap.org) as renderer your tracks could look clustered.
There are a lot better map renderer that could overcome this problem with a more contrast map with a easier to read map.
Mapnik is not very userfriendly. But this is the good thing about OSM. The data is free and everybody can decide by himself what elements are more important for him.
Can you tell us what kind of device with what kind of application you are using ? Maybe we can suggest you a better app?
As you can see, Forests as opposed to farmlands have a less dominant color.
Moreover, since farmlands are subject to seasons, most of the time in reality they will look much less prominent than the surrounding forests.
The problem (just my own personal observation) becomes more obvious in less than Ideal off-road conditions IE: lighting, vibrations, speed etc’.
As long as the contrast is high, meaning- tracks on light color background, the readability of the map is much better and faster and less prone to (sometimes) costly and time consuming mistakes.
Harel and Zeev who develop this map are very responsive to feature requests as the map is still being tweaked a lot.
Zeev posts here as zstadler. Please contact him directly.
BTW I agree with you that the farmland colour should be subtler to increase contrast (and also for nicer design)
I’m very sorry for the latest color change in the map.
I agree they are not so friendly…
we are still adding new features and fixing bugs so it is a work in progress, we do appreciate constructive criticism
I’m a program engineer, not a graphic designer, however, i do feel that these areas should be visible somehow, if anyone can send me a BMP of a selected area with a different color scheme i would appreciate it a lot! (also hex colors will be good as well)
also if you think that these area feature for orchads, vineyars, farmlend, grass, meadow etc… are not helping in any way we can remove them, I thought it might help…
the thing that immediately made me fall in love with this map, is its relative simplicity.
With maps like SAMASH or military style maps, I’ve found myself struggling more and more often to decipher what I was looking at. I mean, it really gotten this bad to the point of sometimes needing a magnifying glass (I assure you it’s not my eyesight ) When it comes to off-road driving or worse, cycling, for me this is not an acceptable option.
So if it was me, I would leave it as it was before, except maybe for small known local farmlands which can be somewhat useful to verify ones coordinates. I honestly can’t see any benefit in coloring huge farmlands (which will look like barren land once the dry season starts anyway).
The high contrast between the topography and land cover makes a world of differens in the situations I’ve described earlier, so my approach would be to keep it simple when possible.
If you still believe this is necessary, here is a small example where a forest and a farmland are adjacent. I have used a very faint green color to represent a farmland. It’s still visible but not as dominant – HEX # E9FDE0.
We’ll update the map with suggested color and see if it is truly needed or not. (it will take a few days to show up in the site…)
If you feel there are other colored areas that should not be colored let us know.
Thanks for the ideas, we have updated the map with latest changes.
I took the yellow pattern for field and meadow, and the green for scrubs and parks.
the color I used should be subtle and should keep a good contrast.
Zeev had updated the map up until zoom 15 (as of this writing) and will continue updating zoom 16 in the next hours.
feel free to take a look and comment, as mentioned earlier, if you feel that these color schemes are making the map worst instead of better let us know…
the site had been updated too and we hope you like the newly added features
