OSM visually difficult

[evoltech]

The rainbow coloured map tile is really distracting and hard to visually parse but it's no big deal if there's no way to easily change that with ushahidi/openstreetmaps.

[evoltech]

It is possible to change and I would like to as well, but it is a bit of work. A bit of interesting work I would say as well. We are currently using one of the public OSM map servers. There are many others and you can host your own. OSM allows you to customize/style the map overlays as you whish. They have to then be rendered and uploaded to a map tile server. One of the first customisations I would make is removing some of what I would call clutter from the maps. A good portion of this work is required for the beta or public 1.0 (I haven't decided in what release the feature belongs) of the mobile application. The idea is that we want to have all of the tiles for a set of zoom levels on local storage on the phones because wireless bandwidth will decrease during mobilizations as there will be a saturation of the towers in specific regions. Without locally stored tiles map rendering will be much slower and will have intermittent failures in some circumstances.

The process of creating the tile set is very similar to the process of hosting our own OSM tile server. I have done some of the initial research into what is required here, but it is all really new technology to me, but it does not require coding more involved then CSS with a few of the tools I have found and there is a huge support community.