Redesign of OpenStreetMap website and new map colors

Currently the website and the colors of the map don’t look too appealing. OpenStreetMap seems to be stuck in the 2000s in this matter. This may not be top priority thing for a project like OSM but it would be great to introduce some freshness into this. This would certainly bring some new users to the world of OpenStreetMap and be more attractive to the old users.

That idea is not bad in general, but have a look at

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Tasks

Please consider also my article I have recently posted here:

“Avoid empty map tiles where we have data!” at http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=342431

It fits perfectly into this thread also!

Stemming from a discussion on a diary entry I created http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Mark%20Newnham/diary/19723 , I’m trying to start a project about getting an improved home screen for openstreetmap.org when someone lands there while using a mobile device. I feel that it is extremely unfriendly (i know, i’ve used it) and that many potential contributors could be frightened away simply by the fact that there is no explanation to what is going on. A redirect to an extremely simple mobile framework screen would be better than what is going on now.

I’ve recently placed a request in to the wiki team to get the mobile frontend installed on the wiki as part of the same request.

I’m assuming that the mobile interface would have to be built in ruby, and I’ve no experience at all in that, and no real time to learn it. I’ve loads of experience in php/javascript development who’s used jquery wrappers to build mobile web apps, but I’m happy to be involved in building prototypes and to donate bandwidth and disk space to such a project.

If there is a more appropriate place for this discussion let me know, or if there is already a project, or someone knows someone who could help get this going, please comment…

More appropriate places are the dev@ mailing list (for OSM development in general), the rails-dev@ mailing list (for the osm.org website), and the #osm-dev IRC channel on OFTC (for bouncing ideas off other developers). Very few developers look at this forum, I’m afraid.

Would be good to have you on board. As you no doubt know, there’s no shortage of good ideas, but never enough people to implement them… so good-quality code contributions are very much welcome.