Hello all
I’m a regular OSM uploader, gathering data with OSM Tracker on a bike. I also do some mapping abroad, for which I obviously need to pre-download a set of tiles before I head out. I tried using JTileDownloader, but didn’t have much luck with it, and actually since a laptop upgrade it doesn’t seem to work for me at all.
So I’ve written my own program in Visual Basic. It does pretty much what JTileDownloader was supposed to do, plus it has a slippy-map interface for selecting an area of tiles and it can poll and parse the /status message for previously downloaded tiles, updating those that need it.
I’d love to share it with the community, but whilst developing it, I came across the Tile Usage Policy.
Would the type of application I’ve written contravene this, do you think? If so, did JTileDownloader contravene it too, or was there something specific about it that made it ‘legal’? I seem to remember it would pause for a few seconds after every few tiles - perhaps this was required to abide by the policy.
BTW, does anyone else find things a bit daunting here sometimes? I’m not sure whether I should be asking this in help.openstreetmap.org, forum.openstreetmap.org or one of the mailing lists…
Anyway, thanks for you time
Nick