As a Waze editor, you are an unpaid volunteer. You work for Waze for nothing and your working environment is WME - the Waze Map Editor. The people who provide this environment treat us with contempt.

For many years it's been obvious that the WME developers never use WME. They design the interface on lovely, big monitors, properly mounted on desks and in first-class condition, whilst utterly ignoring the conditions most of us are working with: the most-used screen size - as measured by global web site visitors - is 1366x768. The result is unfortunate for us: lots of wasted whitespace. The most obvious and annoying example has always been the left-hand panel where the segment details are shown: if your screen is anything less than full HD resolution, you will be constantly scrolling to see all the details.

But what's worse than the bad design are the pointless changes they sometimes make to WME for no good reason. Remember I described WME as your working environment? Imagine one day you come to work and sit down at your desk - and someone has decided to alter your monitor height and fix it in a position that's comfortable for them, but not you. Or they've glued the keyboard to the desk in their preferred position. Or they've changed your favourite mouse for a trackball. You might be able to get used to these changes, but it will always take you time and you may never work as well as you used to.

The straw that broke the camel's back for me came in May 2016. Waze moved the zoom bar from the right side of the screen to the left - for no reason they have EVER explained. So I decided it was time to use my long-rusty programming skills and give something back to the community. The script rapidly grew from there as I worked on improving the WME UI for myself and other people made requests - and as Waze continued to screw up the interface with things like the new layers menu.

Then, in 2017, Waze announced they were going to completely re-design WME. Staff promised us that feedback from users would be taken into account. In October they released the new WME design to beta testers - and it was a direct slap in the face! Apart from incorporating a couple of ideas from WME Clicksaver, the new UI was good-looking, consistent - and a quantum leap backwards in usability. The V2 interface wasted, if anything, slightly more space than V1, whilst also eliminating nearly all contrast from the UI. Buttons lost their button appearance, whilst some menus were now styled as buttons. AND THEY MOVED THE ZOOM CONTROL AGAIN AND REMOVED THE SLIDER! It is awful - and whilst beta testers were still identifying new problems with the V2 interface, Waze released it without warning to production! It took me nearly 2 months to re-write just about every part of this script, to make old features work again and deal with the new screwups.

When they announced they were working on the new design, I foolishly expressed the hope this script would become redundant. Instead it's more necessary than ever.