OSMembrane - GUI front-end for Osmosis

tskn · 2011-02-15T19:43:36.000Z

Hello OSM community,

we’re 3 students which had to develop a Graphical Interface for Osmosis during a practical task. This task now is finished and we can release our product to the real world and see whether the world needs it or not.

The program is written in Java with Swing and named OSMembrane, the name is a pun on Osmosis and semipermeable membranes.
It is available at http://www.osmembrane.de/ (the site is in English), here’s a screen:

There you can obtain the latest executable release as well as the source code and project managment.
It’s licensed under the GPL to be compatible with software already present in OSM.
The Osmosis tasks are included via an XML file so it is extendible. Currently supported locales are English and German.

We’re primarily interested in feedback for OSMembrane: Do you like it? Do you need it? Will you use it in the future? What’s good and what’s bad?
So please don’t hesitate to post your thoughts, a lousy answer is better than none.

And additionally, since we won’t be able to spend too much additional time on this project we’d also like to offer the possibility to maintain the project and continue the development, if anyone likes to.

Greetings

MikeN1 · 2011-02-15T22:11:27.000Z

This looks like a great tool. I don’t get into Osmosis very often, but it takes some time to re-digest the command line operation each time. I hope that someone will be able to continue development in the future.

Tordanik · 2011-02-16T01:02:24.000Z

I’ve just played with OSMembrane a bit. So far, it has all the features I would have expected, a great feature that even was a surprise for me (integration of the JOSM bounding box chooser) and no major flaws either - good job.

Some more detailed observations/opinions (aka nitpicking):

Seeing certain parameters directly in the diagram would be useful, such as file names for read/write tasks. This would make it easier to visually identify them when there are multiple instances within a pipeline.
I accidentally chose “open”, rather than “import”, several times, and exposing that distinction through the UI feels somewhat unnecessary.
There doesn’t seem to be an option to change it to a native look and feel in the preferences. Without that, Swing applications tend to look a bit “alien”, imo.

To be honest, though, I never really had problems with the command line interface of Osmosis, so this wouldn’t quite have been #1 on my “urgent needs” list. But now that it’s available, I can imagine using it. I’m certainly going to give it a try the next time I set up an Osmosis pipeline.

If you want more exposure, I encourage you to post your announcement to appropriate mailing lists, such as dev and osmosis-dev.

tskn · 2011-02-16T15:09:14.000Z

Thanks for the responses so far.

I’ve added your suggestions to the redmine and posted on both dev and osmosis-dev mailing lists.

Greetings