Re: ANNOUNCE: MChronos - Astronomy Clock Applet
 

iirc, gtk, and by extention, pygtk, will be turned over to community, kinda like how Qt is on current platform.

as for how easy it is to go from pyGTK to pyQt, no clue...

Heh, i was wondering a bit why the gps way of getting my location was giving me a slightly different daily solar track then when i did it by hand, but now i see that i got my longitude and latitude reversed.

anyways, now that the ini is in a much more accessible place, and one have the ability to write to it using the menu, i guess there is no biggie to have a configuration window.

only "bug" then is that using the on-applet buttons to change modes seems to not be reflected in the menus. so that turning text on or off using the buttons will not alter the state of the checkmark next to the text flag in the menu.

Re: ANNOUNCE: MChronos - Astronomy Clock Applet
 

Yep, that bug is also mentioned in the README. I lost a lot of hair so far on that one -- in fact I went through the effort of changing 'global' variables to proper 'self' variables to help solve that one, but it didn't help. The 'menu' section seems *unaware* of the current mode set using buttons -- but the reverse is just fine! :(

Re: ANNOUNCE: MChronos - Astronomy Clock Applet
 

Thanks for the update Darren. I installed the new version from extras devel with no problems. I chmoded my .ini file and now my GPS position is saved to the .ini file. Great! :D

I checked out the planet and star labels and my only suggestion is to up the magnitude on the stars that get names to make it a little less cluttered. It looks like all the stars shown are named so it may not be possible.

Anyway, this is a great applet that has a permanent spot on my NIT. Thanks for all your hard work!

Re: ANNOUNCE: MChronos - Astronomy Clock Applet
 

Thanks for confirming correct installation from 'extras-devel' and ability to 'Save' by 'chmod'. Did you find old stuff 'left behind' in '/usr/lib/hildon-desktop' that you needed to clean up yourself? I would have guessed that the application manager would first 'delete' and then 're-install'...

Right now, the names of *all* the 94 (?) built-in stars for the PyEphem library are being displayed. Without the ability to 'zoom' (like MEphemeris has), it is bound to get crowded. Are you suggesting some controls to limit magnitude -- or some hard cut-off value?

Thanks for the feedback -- it helps to make the hair-pulling a bit more worth it :) If you have other ideas that 'make sense' for an applet like this, please suggest them.

Re: ANNOUNCE: MChronos - Astronomy Clock Applet
 

I updated it and looks better and mchronos.ini is now in ~/.mchronos which is better.
BUT:
- it is soooooo slow far slower than the previous version. The buttons below respond after more than 20 seconds.
- at this update (and previous ones) the location is reset to some US location 49 N 98 west.

-

Re: ANNOUNCE: MChronos - Astronomy Clock Applet
 

Glad you like it :)

I haven't personally noticed any change in the speed of the app. Again, I would need to get feedback from others on their own experiences. Back in message #41 of this thread, you also indicated a slowness problem, but no one else was able to confirm. I will agree that the 'button' presses are 'unreliable', so perhaps use the 'menu' buttons if you can to see if that helps.

Well, yes, the 'default' lat/long is (and always was) stored in the 'ini' file, so you would have to change that to your own personal preference (see README). Otherwise, the package default is near *my* location :)

Re: ANNOUNCE: MChronos - Astronomy Clock Applet
 

Clicking on the ten blue small buttons responds very slowly thai is what I mean.
Which menu do you mean ?

Is it not able that the mchronos.ini retains the personal settings when already set ?

Re: ANNOUNCE: MChronos - Astronomy Clock Applet
 

Have you looked at the README file? One of the major changes to the most recent version is the introduction of standard Maemo-style menu options, as an alternative to using the fake 'buttons':

Home -> Applet Settings -> MChronos

I am not quite sure what you mean by this. If you edit the 'mchronos.ini' file manually, it will certainly preserve whatever changes you make. If you make changes inside the applet itself, then you can also use the 'Save' option in the menu. If you don't do either of these, then the settings will merely be read as-they-are the next time the applet restarts.

EDIT: Don't forget the instructions in msg #73 about changing the permission bits on the ini file:

chmod 777 mchronos.ini

Re: ANNOUNCE: MChronos - Astronomy Clock Applet
 

Thanks a lot, I didn't realize it, this works MUCH better !
I updated via the update function of the Application Manager so I didn't notice any README.

Re: ANNOUNCE: MChronos - Astronomy Clock Applet
 

Glad you like the effort I made to learn how to do that crazy menu stuff :)

The location of the README is mentioned in #73 ('/home/user/.mchronos'), and the reminder that the README is also available on my software webpage is mentioned in #78 (http://darethehair.googlepages.com/software.html).

Re: ANNOUNCE: MChronos - Astronomy Clock Applet
 

Question for N810 users that has been asked in the past but not directly answered:

Does the 'gpsbt' GPS mode on your devices use (successfully) the 'built-in' GPS devices inside your tablets?

I have a user of 'MChronos' that experiences a 'reset' whenever he tries to use this program for a GPS reading with the 'gpsbt' mode.

This question would also apply to the 'MEphemeris' program.

Re: ANNOUNCE: MChronos - Astronomy Clock Applet
 

Thank you for both MChronos and mephemeris. I installed them both through the repositories without difficulty.

I'm a seaman and still consider myself a navigator, even though we just read GPSs most of the time.

I like the precise information and the different ways to show it.

I'm looking now for a way to suppress the display of the Season bar and show just the Sun and Moon bars.

I find the applet pretty slow; I'm using an N800 with Diablo. But I'm also displaying Clock, FM Radio, HomeIP, Internet Radio, and Internet search.

I edited my mchronos.ini, and noticed the entire ~/.mchronos directory is owned by the root user and group.

Rather than changing the permissions to world-read and world-write, I changed the ownership of the directory and everything in it. Perhaps you could have the files installed that way. That's a better solution than chmod 777.

When I rebooted the N800 mchronos came up with the Sun and Season bars, their text data, and the mode toggle buttons, but no Moon bar or data.

I disabled the applet and re-enabled it, and the display came up normally.

Re: ANNOUNCE: MChronos - Astronomy Clock Applet
 

I am glad you like them! 99% of what I want for MChronos is done now, but I am hoping to do more for MEphemeris after I get receive some assistance from the author of the great PyEphem python libraries.

Yes, I am not a 'navigator', but I also like convenient/precise information available to me -- and a device small enough to carry it around :) Unfortunately, the screen on my N800 is terrible in sunny conditions :(

Well, I will certainly consider making that an option, but I cannot say when that might occur. Hmmm...

Yep, it is slow, and that has been mentioned a few times on these threads. Sadly, there is very little that I can do about it -- the apps are *not* written in 'C', but in 'Python' -- so that I even had a chance of being able to write something as complex as this :)

I have subsequently 'learned the tricks' to changing permissions during the actual package install, so if/when I make more changes to this stuff, hopefully it will no longer be a 'post-install' issue for the user.

Well, as far as I know, this has nothing to do with the app itself, though I cannot comment on what the problem cause actually is. Some behaviors on my N800 remain a mystery!

BTW, can *you* answer the question about whether the BT GPS mode works with the N810? No one has ever commented on that!

Re: ANNOUNCE: MChronos - Astronomy Clock Applet
 

Please, don't. The problem is not permissions but ownership. Install the directories and files in the user's home directory so that they are owned by the user named "user" and the group named "users". Then ownership will be correct, and with correct ownership there won't be any permissions problem to solve.

No, I can't -- I have an N800.

GPS mode works on the N800, although it would be easy to conlude that it doesn't.

It's necessary to pair the GPS with the N800 in Control Panel --> GPS Location. Maemo-mapper has its own GPS interface, so M-m users may not know that.