Vespucci 17.1 BETA Highlights

2022-05-11

Bing imagery no longer available for 3rd-party builds

Since we added Bing support over a decade ago, the API key to access the service has been included with the source code for third parties to use, most notably F-Droid as a courtesy. Starting with this version this is no longer the case as allowing access to a wide range of sources is considered an anti-feature by the operators of F-Droid, see Vespucci on F-Droid.

With other words starting with version 17.1 Bing imagery will no longer be available for F-Droid users. If you have your own key, you can load it via the the Tools menu, just as any other key. See the default key file and test key file for the format and an example.

It should be noted that the other claims by F-Droid in this context are incorrect, neither Mapillary support or Github access has ever been available in 3rd-party builds of Vespucci.

Improved GPX layer support

The GPX layer has been reworked to allow multiple individual layers that can be created by either loading a GPX file from device or downloading from the OSM website. Some additional functionality has been implemented per layer, see layer control and some more styling options have been added.

Preset improvements

Previously Vespucci assumed a single level hierarchy of keys to match as "real-life" objects, for example all "highway" keys were assumed to define an object. Unluckily in real life this doesn't always lead to satisfactory results, for example cycleway=asl. This version adds a further attribute to the preset configuration that allows to define exceptions to the hierarchy, for more information see the preset documentation.

Preset items and tags that have the "deprecated" attribute are now automatically indicated. This removes the need to add this to the text of the items or tags. To make this work preset items can now have the same name, this doesn't just work for deprecated items, but for example for country specific presets.

In version 15.1 we added a menu item in the property editor to display a modal with alternative tagging suggestions for the current object, this has been replaced with a display of the alternative preset items (if any exist) above the most recently used preset list.

Version 17.1 further adds support for large images in presets this can make selection of a specific tag value easier by supply visual examples. An example preset bicycle parking with large images is available for download.

To make adding presets from the JOSM preset list even easier we now re-write urls from that page in the Preset help on device to auto-download an install Uris.

Way rendering improvements

Previously area rendering (both simple and multi-polygons) utilized offset patterns to indicate the "inside" of the object. This has now been replaced in most cases by an offset of the line, this reduces artifacts and avoids some of the performance issues the previous solution had.

The offset functionality has the additional benefit that it allows offset casing of ways, an example of this can be found in the rendering of highway=residential that now indicates if sidewalk have been tagged (left, right or on both sides).

Upload reminder

If you exit the app with unpublished changes you will receive a reminder notification in regular intervals. THe default interval is 6 hours, but this can be set to very high values essentially disabling it for practical purposes. See user interface settings.

Include Androids MediaStore in scan for images

You can now optionally scan the MediaStore for images. This is mainly useful on Android 10 and higher which doesn't allow direct access to images owned by other apps any more. As this will include all images in the MediaStore that contain location information this is turned off by default. See See user interface settings.

Automatic capitalization of name tags

We now automatically capitalize name tags on input for latin script. The setting for this can be changed to one off No capitalization , Word capitalization and Sentence capitalization . The default is Word capitalization .

Miscellaneous

Upgrading from previous versions

Known problems