Last week I posted a quick survey for Maperitive users. The basic motivation was to see how many people are still using Windows XP SP2, so I can decide whether I can migrate Maperitive to .NET 4.0 (which is not available on SP2). But I added a few more questions in the mix, just for the fun of it.
I got 138 reponses so far, which is much more than I expected, so thanks for everyone who participated.
The results (I just copy&pasted charts from Google Docs, sorry for the labels cut-off):
What operating system(s) are you using to run Maperitive?
Participants could choose multiple answers - in fact about 1/4 of participants were using Maperitive on multiple operating systems. About 4% of people marked they are using Windows XP SP2 - I am wondering what is the reason they haven’t upgraded to SP3 (my guess is they are using Maperitive in corporate environments which tend to be slow on upgrades).
Two things that I think are important from these results:
- I can start work on migrating to .NET 4.0. For those unfortunate few who will be left out by this I can only say: try to upgrade to Service Pack 3. The official .NET 4.0 has been released two years ago (and first beta was released back in 2009) and it’s increasingly hard to support development on older versions of .NET framework. 3rd party libraries Maperitive depends on have mostly migrated to .NET 4.0 and this means missing out on new features and bugfixes.
- A lot (50%) of people are using Maperitive on Linux and Mac. This is much more than I expected and it means I will still have to keep Maperitive running on Mono. This is sometimes hard, since not everything is supported by Mono correctly. It also means a lot of people are willing to put up with an inferior user interface (due to Mono porting issues) for the sake of the functionality Maperitive offers. This is complimentary.
What it is the main reason you’re using Maperitive?
No surprises here, other than that at least 1/3 of users find Maperitive simple to use. This is a high number, given the fact that the documentation is not that good.
There’s one interesting (and a little bit surprising) answer:
We can use OSM offline, without prerendering thousands of tiles. It is very helpful for emergency services, because you cannot rely on a mobile internet connection everywhere or in the case of a disaster.
What kind of a user do you consider yourself to be?
Looks like the main audience of Maperitive are users who like to hack. Only 18% of participants in the survey consider themselves to be non-technical. I guess that explains the large “simple to use” percentage in the previous question :)
I use Maperitive mainly to…
Another question with multiple possible answers. I’m pleased that a lot of you are using Maperitive’s “power tools” like tile generation and exporting. I’m also pleased that at least 37% of participants are using the SVG export functionality, which I worked hard to implement.
I use Maperitive mainly for…
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that most of you are doing hobby mapping with Maperitive. As OpenStreetMap reaches more people (and companies), I think the percentage of non-profit and commercial usages will increase.
Conclusion
The survey is still open (I think I will keep it open for some time), so you’re welcome to have your say. There will be more surveys in the future - this one was done as an experiment, in just 5 minutes. Again, thanks for participating!
