JOSM and Satellite Imagery

I started seriously working with JOSM (Java Open Street Map) last night and started to get the hang of things. One very useful feature is the YWMS plugin which to loads satellite imagery into your map. This helps you get your bearings and can help you line things up with your GPX tracks.

The images come from Yahoo! through a very weird and brittle process. They are also not very high resolution in some areas so YMMV. The process involves sending a link to a gecko based browser which will render the resulting images and dump them to a file, which is retrieved by the plugin and loaded into your map. When I first tried this, I failed miserably. I'm using Firefox 3, and apparently 3 is not supported yet. So I downloaded Firefox 2, but some interaction with Ubuntu 8.10 renders 2 unable to connect to the network and so it fails for me. Some further research turned up the fact that YWMS just wants a gecko based browser. So I tried galeon and epihany and struck out. What finally worked for me was Seamonkey, which can be easily installed using apt-get. Once you point YWMS at Seamonkey, everything works.

That is, as far as you can call this convoluted process "working." I think that the YWMS plugin developer found a nice cheat around doing any tile stitching by using Firefox's javascript engine to render the imagery and paint it to a file. It's a clever hack, but this is really way too brittle as evidenced by the FF3 breakage. I might take a look at Yahoo!'s REST API to see if I can do a little better here.