[ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

If you're like me, you spend every waking hour wondering where the moons of Jupiter are currently located. The orrery app will now show you where the moons of Jupiter are at any time, and how they are moving relative to Jupiter. It will also tell you the time of events such as satellite eclipses, transits and occultations, as well as whether or not those events will be visible from your current location.
More information can be found here:http://wiki.maemo.org/Orrery#Jovian_Moons

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

I've uploaded another new version (3.6) of the orrery. I'm not going to push it into Extras Testing, because the QA process seems to be stalled. The main new feature is a page to present the data needed for Sextant Navigation, which was requested by a user. That feature obviously wil be of interest to very few users. However this version also includes an important bug-fix for the refraction correction (which improves the accuracy of things like the Sun and Moon rise and set times) and also requires one less process to be active while the orrery is running (that process was a launcher process which now terminates once it has done its job), so even people without a sextant on their 80 foot yacht may want to upgrade to the new version.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

Orrery 3.4 is already promoted to Extras, so there is no problem if you promote 3.6 to Testing.

It's true that the QA promotion is being a pain in the *** but please while we are working to fix it, don't stop promoting your software.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

OK, I will. Thanks.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

Missed your opening post so have only just updated. Jupitor is my favourite thing through the telescope so love the new moons page. It's so easy to understand.Just muted my tele with pierogi to write this. Thanks for carrying on with development for my phone.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

Your program is a mega highlight for my n900. I love it, my daughter loves it.
Thank you so much!!

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

Thanks, King Ralphred and peter parker. It's always nice to hear that someone is actually using my code. Please, please, please send suggestions for new features you'd like to see (orrery.moko@gmail.com). Apart from adding eclipses (adding solar eclipses usefully is a BIG project), I'm sorta running out of ideas for new features.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

Thank you so much for still supporting Orrery on Maemo 5 and N900!

I like to use this so often these days when the brighter planets are visible each evening.
Orrery is a little gem, a great gem!

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

Thanks for the kind words. What would you like to see it do, that it does not yet do?

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

Orrery was one of the reasons to change phone and buy one n900... Many thanks for your work!

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

I am very happy with the features of Orrery as it is.

What could be improved IMHO are the GUI gestures:
- the region where to click to turn more left or right - this should be larger I think, I often miss it getting the wrong action, or there should be buttons (a small arrow left and right, perhaps).
- I do not see how to get out of zoom-in especially when zooming inadvertendly. Usually I end up quitting Orrery and restarting it... Maybe zooming should not be so easy in the first place...

Nevertheless it is a really great app.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

To get out of zoom mode, just touch the app's display area for about a second without moving your finger (much). It will return to the normal display scale when you release your finger.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

For some unknown reason I find the app crashes when viewing the animated schematic solar system.
There's no way to stop the animation because the buttons become unresponsive. Trying to go back to the "Other Screens" by clicking the back arrow results in the error message that Orrery is not responding.
I've found this to be the case with previous versions also.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

I will admit that there's no way to stop the app "animation" once you start it. It's being done in a very simple/stupid way, and the buttons are indeed unresponsive while the animation takes place. I guess I need to do it in a separate thread. However, I have not ever seen the program *crash* during the animation (and I've looked at it a lot). Could you perhaps run the program interactively and force it to crash in that way? If you can produce a core dump file and send it to me, I might be able to debug the problem (privacy warning: if you send me a core dump I can see your private location catalog information).

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

Ok. Here's one for you. I'm fairly certain I saw the international space station tonight and remember seeing it the same time last year. I bet the data is out there somewhere and a simple aproximate time when it's gong to whizz past would be ace.

Many thanks.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

Don't know if you can get anytthing from these. Turns out it was the space station I saw. It will be around between 7 and 8 tonight. 7.22 to be precise over Ireland

http://www.isstracker.com/

http://www.astronomy.ie/iss.php

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

I think I remember my brother once had an app like this on his android phone. The app showed the part of the sky where he pointed his phone, or something like that.

This is probably a lot of work too, but that would be nice.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

I'm fairly certain that uses the built in compass which the n900 doesn't have unfortunately.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

Yes - there's really no way to do this with the N900, since it has no compass. People have suggested using the accelerometers, with some kind of pre-alignment, but they aren't precise enough to accurately track someone slowly rotating their phone in azimuth.

I will look into putting the Space Station passes into a future version. I'm currently working on eclipses, but I can add the Space Station (and other satellite) passes after that.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

A new version of orrery has been pushed to Extras Testing. This new version can display the two comets which will be visible in 2013. Details here:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=87604

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

Thanks for the update, very useful.
Any chance of an icon in the next update?

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

What do you mean? I have an icon, is like stars, black and purple (or something).

Greetings.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

Sorry, I mean in HAM the "Maemo-icon" in the control file.
The package icon is purple stars on a black background, as you say.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new vresion of orrery for N900
 

Nice pleasure to use extraterrestial app:)