Can we have these super high resolution aerial images I can see in
Potlatch in JOSM also?
Have a look at http://img138.imageshack.us/g/potlatch.jpg/ to see an
example from
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=39.029419&lon=-94.818294&zoom=19
Wow, that was even higher resolution than Google has in my area, that must be like 1 pixel every 3:rd inch or so!
I was not really able to get it working with Aerial images in JOSM, it worked, but it took every tile like 7 to 15 minutes to load…
Frederik explained in the mailing list, that these SuperHiRes-Images are available via Yahoo’s Flash-API (which is used by Potlatch) but not at the HTML-API (which JOSM uses): http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/josm-dev/2010-August/004786.html
Currently there is no plan or idea how to access the Flash-API with JOSM. 
I do not know much of Java, or why they use gnome-web-photo and such to fetch tiles… (I would just fetch the content using libCURL into memory and decode with libPNG or whatever, maybe you can’t use libCURL and libPNG from Java? ).
But this might be what is needed: http://djproject.sourceforge.net/main/index.html
I could not get the demos running, maybe that is because I am on a 64bit installation. I could see os=linux & arch=x86 and os=linux & arch=i386 (To me, that is the same… Almost) in some kind dialogue that popped up.
However, if they manages to get it up and running; Users should be given a choice whether or not they want to activate it (preferable if it could just be used where the normal method can’t fetch a certain resolution) as Flash is slow and eats memory.
Hope this is a hint towards the goal.
You can’t just pull down the tiles, you have to use Yahoo’s API - this is a condition of access. That’s why JOSM jumps through all those hoops.