2006 - Potlatch, OSM’s First Default Editor
Potlatch 1, originally an Adobe Flash-based map editor, was designed by Richard Fairhurst and released mid 2006. The name Potlatch came from the name of the newsletter of the Letterist International art collective. For many years it was embedded in OSM.org and was influential in the early success of the map because it was so easy to use. Although it is no longer the default editor, it was updated in 2020 with help from a grant from the OSM Foundation and is still in use today.
Potlatch’s distinguishing characteristic is that it’s extraordinarily ergonomic for moderately familiar users, without ever having too complex an interface. With a handful of keyboard shortcuts you can zip about the map and perform common editing actions efficiently: for example, you can skip 10 nodes back/forward along a way with one keypress, jump to the other end of the way with another, then assign a set of multiple tags to the way (which you’ve previously recorded) with another single keypress. As yet, Potlatch does not run reliably on Linux systems due to Adobe AIR for Linux being discontinued.