Notices

Hi gnuite,

Can you tell more, how to get mapper working with gpsd?

Just started reading this long thread. How about GPSunite for a name? Uses all of the letters in "gnuite" and makes sense since it would work on multiple platforms. Oh yeah, no hits on Google.

MMapper is near perfect as is. This being said, if I were to think of improvements they would include the following….

Specific Data Info Area -- similar to the existing GPS Info Panel create additional panels (same location, size, and form factor as GPS panel) for the following;
GPS Info Panel – as is
POI Info Panel – POI listings of POI’s that are on map the closest on top
Route Info Panel – Data for directions, turn by turns, with the next turn at the top so that as you drive it cycles thru the route. This would help due to N800’s volume issues, and the fact that the radio is always on.
Map Info Panel – zoom levels available for that location, size quantity, layer info
These could be visible one at a time in the same space as the existing GPS info, and prevent the need to access menus, something difficult to do when driving.

Layers – Allow transparent maps in overlays or layers. For example MS MapCruncher has tools to extract particular colors form a scanned map say the blue of a bus line and then use this mapped transparency to overlay as a layer the base map. This could be used for traffic info, bus routes, hiking trails.

It would be great to have a visual indicator of which maps are available at other zoom levels for that GPS location. This could be displayed as part of a Map Info Panel mentioned above.

If a Companion App is done for non – Maemo environments, it would be great if both could share the same db format and act as a method of loading maps, layers, POI information and creation, and trip planner (route generator) for example.

Hope I did not duplicate items in the forum already. MMapper is a great app and I look forward to seeing what is done for v2.

Hi there...When is version 2.0 going to be available? I am sure like me, there are a lot of viewers excited to see the release of version 2.0. Please tell me, rotated maps will still be part of this release.

Cheers

It would be also very nice if there was an option to move the map directly on the screen (dragging it like google-maps), it would free the 4 directions button for usefull functions.

Although you can't currently drag, you can still use the stylus to effectively move you around. Whatever point on the map you tap will be the new center of the map so it moves accordingly (this may be related to settings for all I know -- I haven't changed any setting in months).

Yes I know this mode but it is quite disturbing to the eye : it would be great to see the map graduately moving while recentering (or dragging).

I know you all have been waiting patiently, so I thought I'd give you a bit of status regarding Maemo Mapper v2.0. This post is basically about letting you know what's working and what's left to be done. I still don't have a release date in mind.

Of course, maps are now stored in a database. I tried using sqlite, and the code to use sqlite is actually still there, but it's #ifdef'ed out right now because of speed and overhead concerns. I might allow the option to use sqlite in the future, but I don't see much point to it. The one advantage that it gave was the ability to avoid storing the same maps (those pesky 103-or-106-byte single-color maps), but even with that advantage, the overhead was still significantly higher than the solution that I chose (duplicate maps are both rare and small; ignoring them saved only maximum 5% disk space).

The chosen database solution is GDBM, which is a simple hash-map database with some decent in-memory caching. The one downside to GDBM is that it doesn't automatically pack the database when deleting a map (that space is instead re-used later when other maps are added), so deleting maps won't immediately reduce the size of the database. The packing has to be done manually, and I've been thinking about whether to perform that step automatically when Maemo Mapper closes, or to make it a button that the user presses to manually initiate the packing.

Anyway, the database solution works really well, and although it's a bit slower than using the file system directly (no concurrency in database access; same problem with sqlite), the file system overhead is significantly lower. I can't wait to get this enhancement to you guys, but I'm still testing it and working on my other v2.0 additions, like ...

I have completely changed the GPS data retrieval and map retrieval to ditch curl and asynchronous Gnome-VFS in favor of multi-threaded, synchronous Gnome-VFS calls. This doesn't mean anything to most of you, but the consequence is that Maemo Mapper can retrieve both map data and GPS data from just about anything that Gnome-VFS supports (HTTP, FTP, file on disk, GPSD). It also might fix the crashing problem when a bluetooth GPS device goes out of range. The map downloading works all right, although it may be a little slower. I'm still working out some bugs in the GPS data retrieval, particularly with out-of-range detection and subsequent retrying-without-failing.

Map rotation works, but it's not the fastest thing in the world. There are actually no GTK library calls to rotate an image by an arbitrary angle, so I had to do all the math by hand (matrices, yay). The rotated OpenStreetMap PNGs are actually surprisingly readable, but you will have a harder time reading them, especially if they are upside down. I did manage to keep memory usage low, but the consequence is that any change in the viewpoint takes up to 0.25 seconds or so to redraw (not as fast as v1.x). And yes, auto-rotate is implemented so that--when Auto-Center is enabled--Maemo Mapper will automatically rotate the viewpoint to follow your heading. You can also rotate the viewpoint manually with the directional buttons. You can still choose to map the directional buttons to panning, but you may not need to, because...

I've added drag-to-pan functionality, so when you tap-and-drag the stylus on the map, the map moves with your stylus. It actually looks pretty slick. The old "single-tap to center on a location" mechanism is still in place. I also added "tap on a waypoint to see the description."

And then there's the POI Search stuff that I mentioned in this thread. Check out the thread for details.

Very good news.

gnuite rocks too

About the database : is it really not possible by using GDBM, to check duplicate maps ? You're speaking about 5% of empty duplicate maps... with Google I think, but using OpenStreetMap it's more about 90-95% of "empty" maps in France !

It's also great to know that you work on the "out of range" bluetooth problem, rotate functionnality, tap-and-drag (I'd love to see it !)...

Could it be possible to add some possibilities for mapping buttons ? I'd like to have a button-to-add-poi (like radars...) because when I'm driving it's difficult to tap exactly on the road where I am and when I pass the POI I want to add.

And yes, you "know", we are all "waiting patiently"...