Frantic would be how I described my last two weeks. I have had very little free time to work on Conduit. Everything seems to have come at once!
- I got accepted for summer of code - adding SyncML support to Conduit.
- Alexandre Inacio Rosenfeld also got accepted to SOC to work on Ipod and media support in Conduit.
- I got accepted to speak at GUADEC, which I will be attending, providing all finances work out.
- It looks likely that, as part of my PhD, I will be spending a few months at ENAC (home of the Paparazzi UAV).
Random
- I have been playing with barpanel, a very functional GNOME panel replacement.
- Grape is certainly an interesting UI/desktop mock up. If I had infinite spare time I migh have a hack on it, as an excuse to play with Clutter.
- Props to Jan Bodnar for his excellent Gtk+ and Cairo tutorials.
- My (bad) experiences with Ubuntu 8.04 can be best described by the following picture..
Openstreetmap GPS Mapping Widget
Somewhat tangentially related to my PhD, I have been hacking on a simple Openstreetmap GPS mapping/display widget. Basically because after investigating all the existing mapping programs on linux, none of them supported openstreetmap/openaerialmap and were able to be easily embedded.
It’s basically a port of tangoGPS (by Marcus Bauer) to libsoup and considerable clean-up. The whole thing is now hidden behind a derived GtkDrawingArea with a nice simple 4 function api (other parameters such as zoom, lat, lon, are accessible as gobject properties)
- set_map_center(double lat, double lon, int zoom)
- add_gps_point(double lat, double lon)
- add_roi(double lat, double lon, GdkPixbuf *pixbuf)
- get_bouding_box()
Things like double click, map dragging, scroll to zoom, etc are all handled automatically as you would expect. It caches downloaded tiles and it’s pretty much complete at this point. I hope to be able to post code soon.
Let me just say that I find it awesome that there is somebody working on Mobile Device Sync with Gnome, that’s one of the few pieces of the Linux desktop that are somehow still missing.
Very cool widget.
Is possible to get back the coordinates of where the user click on the map?
@Luigi
Yes, you can get the location the user clicked in the button-release event signal handler using g_object_get(map, “latitude”). You can see the latitude and longitude displayed in the GtkEntry in the screenshot.
Hey John - blowing away .mozilla fixed Firefox 3 on both boxes that were having trouble with it. Works like a dream now, better than FF2 once more.
While I’m not much of a coder, I can definitely tell you that Conduit rocks! I used it to upload photos of my baby to Facebook. Due to some reason or other, Java doesn’t work in Firefox on my Ubuntu distro. I didn’t think I’d be able to upload the photos, however with the Conduit dataprovider I was able to easily upload the photos!
Similar issue with Google Picasa. The WINE based program is OK I guess, but conduit was far easier to use overall.
So, as an end user your program has been a godsend to me. I figured that while I can’t do much, at the very least a great big heartfelt thank you is in order!
You might be interested to know that Marble now also supports openstreetmap..
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3475
I’m the founder of the Roadster project.
Roadster did vector drawing of US TIGER road data. TIGER has a lot of problems (data accuracy, no one-way streets, US-only). OpenStreetMap is clearly the way forward now.
We had talked about splitting Roadster in to two parts: a reusable map widget and a GUI, but it never happened.
Do you have plans to make your widget use a local cache of *vector* data and do the drawing itself, instead of downloading tile images?
There are lots of advantages to having the vector data, including theme-ability (think day or night visible color themes), selective drawing of map features, and driving directions. Vector data can also be much smaller than image data, allowing a portable device to store much more of the world.
If you are interested in producing such a widget, please let me know. I’d love to write a GUI for it.
That OSM widget looks pretty nice, and also seems to be a good step towards better offline cache handling (which seems to be pretty bad in Tangogps). It would be cool if you could make the code available (just put a tgz somewhere) so people can start playing with it.
Thanks, Oliver