Potlatch 1 mapping demonstration on its last day of operation: transcript

Key points

• Buildings are drawn without a Square the Corners tool, using Mapbox satellite imagery because Yahoo imagery no longer exists.
• Holding shift adds more points to a way, and there is no toolbar because the editor always stays in the same mode.
• A new line such as a driveway is started with shift-click and finished with Enter, and the editor remembers previously entered tag values.
• Pressing R repeats the tags, but the speaker accidentally repeated the building tags instead of the driveway tags, a common mistake.
• Wireframe mode is inconvenient to reach, so it is skipped.
• In offline mode changes must be saved explicitly, while live mode saves each object as soon as it is touched.

Chapters

1. 0:03Mapping buildings and switching imagery
2. 0:50Adding points with shift and the single-mode design
3. 1:35Drawing driveways and tagging
4. 2:10Repeating tags and wireframe mode
5. 3:04Muscle-memory mistakes with the repeat key
6. 4:14Offline mode versus live saving

Full transcript

0:03Okay, well, I'm just mapping some buildings in Potlatch 1. And no Square the Corners tool, so I'm just going to try to do my best. That's okay. I drew these in Potlatch 1 back in the day, and I was using Yahoo imagery at the time, so it was a lot worse. I'm using Mapbox imagery. And just to show you how that happened, if I switch back to the Yahoo imagery, it's blank because Yahoo's gone now, but I can switch to this custom URL that I entered for Mapbox satellite.

0:50And it does display modern imagery. So there's a couple unique things about Potlatch 1. So I'm going to need to add some corners to this building. To do that, I'll hold down shift. And it'll just continue to, you know, to add more points. So that's the sort of interaction, like you have something similar in Potlatch 2, in ID and everything, but what's unique is that that same model of you don't have to switch to a different mode works for all kinds of things.

1:35So there's no toolbar at the top, you're always in the same mode. and so i want to draw a new line here for the driveway and to do that i hold down shift and click here and then i hold down shift and click again and then i that starts a new a new line and then to end i push enter i'll make that service road service road driveway it remembers the values I added previously. And I'm going to add another driveway here.

2:10And this I'm going to press R just to repeat the tags. I missed that feature. So yeah, just a bit of repeating. We got some buildings. It's going to be a little bit difficult to tell where things are without wireframe mode, and it's a little inconvenient to get into wireframe mode, so I'm not going to do it.

3:04I can tell you that ID muscle memory is really throwing me for a loop here. That's another thing that tended to happen a lot. I pushed R thinking I was going to repeat the driveway. Nope, it repeated the building. That happened all the time back in the day. so that's why you find random things tag random ways Okay. You can actually choose to close the chain set. You can save multiple times and then close.

4:14So I'm in offline mode, which means that I actually have to explicitly save, but there's also a live mode that will just save every object as soon as you touch it. I'm not doing that here, though. And yeah, that's really all there is to it. Yeah.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Potlatch 1 last day demonstration.webm by Minh Nguyen (2021-01-05), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.