May 21, 2008

Frantic

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!

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.. Firefox crashing

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.

OSM GPS map widget

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)

  1. set_map_center(double lat, double lon, int zoom)

  2. add_gps_point(double lat, double lon)

  3. add_roi(double lat, double lon, GdkPixbuf *pixbuf)

  4. 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.