We’ve just gone live with some changes to the map controls on the OpenStreetMap.org front page.

“Re-organise the map tools. Take them from all four corners and just put them together in a more organised way”, explained Designer Saman Bemel-Benrud in his SOTM U.S. presentation as he put forward this and many other ideas for front page design improvements.

As well as re-arranging things, you can now use browser geo-location to locate the map where you are ( ), and the map layers picker ( ) now gives a preview of the different map styles on offer (Those which we feature on the front page. There are many others of course)

We’re excited to unveil these changes which we think will improve the experience, particularly for new site visitors, and we will continue to make improvements in the coming months. Obviously if you’ve been using the OpenStreetMap website for some time, the re-arrangement may take some getting used to, but we hope you like it too!

Big thanks to John Firebaugh, Saman Bemel-Benrud, Tom MacWright who did the javascript development and design work for this with a healthy dose of feedback and collaboration from others. Many issues have already been discussed and weighed up, but if you have further feedback, the dev talk mailing list could be the best place for it. (Updated: discussion seems to be happening on the ‘talk’ mailing list)

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