Thanks for the kind words. What would you like to see it do, that it does not yet do?
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...
- 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...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
Thanks for the kind words. What would you like to see it do, that it does not yet do?
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.
I'm fairly certain that uses the built in compass which the n900 doesn't have unfortunately.
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.
