Preview our next generation OSM editor: RapiD 2.0

This post was co-authored by Benjamin Clark and Abhishek Tripathi.

The RapiD development team at Meta has been busy working on the next major version of RapiD—our next generation OpenStreetMap (OSM) editor enhanced with open datasets. The most important news is that the new version is lightning fast, so your experience mapping in areas with a lot of data will be much better! We’re excited to announce an early preview of the RapiD 2.0 alpha, and we’d love for you to try it, give feedback and report any issues.

We completely revamped RapiD’s core graphics engine to improve overall performance. The editing experience is smooth and responsive, like you would expect from any modern app.

RapiD 2.0 unlocks editing at zoom levels that were previously not possible. RapiD 2.0 is capable of rendering all features for Tokyo at lower zoom levels (14/15), while previous versions rendered features at zoom level 16.

Tokyo at zoom level 14. Left: RapiD 2.0 renders the dense road network. Right: Rapid 1.1.9 does not render any features.

With RapiD 2.0, the editor remains snappy and interactive even when working in areas with large feature density. At higher zoom levels, previous versions of RapiD would hide a large number of features to enable some interactivity. With RapiD 2.0, we not only render all features, but have improved the performance by 5-10 fold in many cases.

Tokyo at zoom level 16. Left: RapiD 2.0 rendering all features at 10-15 frames per second (fps).
Right: RapiD 1.1.9 rendering a subset of features with ~1 fps.

We’ve also greatly improved our labeling capabilities! RapiD 2.0 increases label fidelity and has updated labeling placements to improve editing workflows.

Johns Creek, Georgia, with ESRI datasets turned on (buildings in green, address points in yellow). Left: Rapid 2.0 improved point labeling, showing the street number over the pin for better navigation. Right: Rapid 1.1.9

We’re confident that RapiD 2.0 will improve your productivity and leave you with a great app experience.

Interested in getting your hands on the RapiD 2.0 alpha? We’ve got you covered! Simply visit https://mapwith.ai/rapid-v2-alpha to get access to the latest features.

RapiD 2.0 is a tool for the OSM community. Help us find bugs in this alpha release to provide the community with the best experience possible when RapiD 2.0 is released for production usage.

If you encounter a bug, click the bug nub in the bottom-right of the RapiD UI. (Note: you will need a GitHub account to submit bug reports to RapiD). This will bring up the bug report form. We’ve improved the bug reporting functionality to auto-fill a bunch of helpful information. All you need to do is type a bug description, how to reproduce it and send it our way.

We would love to hear your feedback on RapiD 2.0 and how we can improve it further. Please reach out to us on your preferred channel:

• OSMUS Slack in the #mapwithai_feedback channel
• MapWithAI & RapiD Facebook group

The RapiD development team will showcase their work at FOSS4G on Aug 25th, 2022.

We’d like to thank Bryan Housel for his significant contributions to the RapiD codebase and RapiD 2.0.