Thanks very much for the kind words about my little app! I'm still very interested in Linux phones, and I plan to port the code to Sailfish. It'll be a major rewrite, I think, because I did not do a good job of separating the UI elements from the computational parts of the code originally. I'll try to do a big cleanup while I do the porting. I've been waiting to see what Jolla actually produces before starting the rewrite, because frankly I was afraid they might fizzle out and produce nothing. I was also afraid they might go the TIzen route, and support only HTML5 apps. I will not rewrite orrery in HTML5. But if they produce anything remotely sensible, I will buy it (I've bought 5 N900s so far). I would have done the port to Sailfish already had Jolla released their Sailfish code for the N950 (I've got one of those too).

The thing that stopped the updates of orrery for the N900 is Solar Eclipses. I started writing that portion of the code, but to do a nice job of that is MUCH harder than for Lunar Eclipses. Because of the effects of the earth's atmosphere, it's basically impossible to say when a Lunar Eclipse starts or stops with a precision of, say, one second. The shadow of the earth is blurry at the edges, because of the atmosphere. Also, everyone who is on the side of the earth that can see the eclipsed moon sees basically the same thing. But the edge of the moon is very sharp (no lunar atmosphere) and the appearance of Solar Eclipses varies tremendously depending on where you are on the earth, so writing the Solar Eclipse part of the orrery is orders of magnitude harder. I need to calculate the path of totality, if any, and plot it on downloaded map tiles, etc., etc. so it's a big project.

Thanks again for your kind words. I'll preorder the first Jolla device as long as it isn't HTML5-only (and there's no evidence of that) or dramatically inferior to the N900 in some way.