Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Quick reply.
You don't need Internet on N900 to get GPS tracking and logging.

To see the map tiles, you need either to draw them by hand, to download them through ModRana (Internet on N900 required) or to download them through PC's Internet connection.

You don't need Internet to see places (cities, towns, villages).

You do need Internet to get routes (from Google); it must be caused by the fact the program doesn't know where the streets and roads are situated.

A feature request to MartinK: let user to draw a route manually (in absence of Internet), and then give him turn-by-turn voice navigation for this route.

You do need Internet to search (Google) for restaurants nearby.

I haven't figured out how to use Points Of Interest, though.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Yes exactly!

Thanks for this and also for the customizable widget!

Possibly changing the button background graphic would go a long way. Current ones look like they are in 256 color.

Oh and have I mention adding portrait mode support, if it's possible? (The category search is useful in this use case.)

(Actually have one more suggestion, I like the placement of the current return-to-previous-level button. However, somehow I feel it might be better to stick with frementle UI and use separate window/view for different menu level. That way the return key will naturally be at the top right position and there would be no need for an return button in the window.)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

what makes this application better than sygic, if any, considering that we do already have sygic?

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

It's mentioned that you have to pay for sygic.
http://www.sygic.com/maemo_smm9_to_smm10.htm

ModRana is free and open source. Due to this obvious advantage, I would like to turn question upside down: what makes sygic better than modrana?

Maybe, sygic is better, but I just cannot check it because I'm not going to buy it. I could take a 7-day trial... but right now ModRana has more features than I can use, so I have no incentive to try yet another application.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

quick bit of feedback - just tried a brief walk through town and tested the reroute feature - it worked extremelly well, thank you martinK for introducing such a useful feature so quickly.

couple of minor observations:
1) I was walking a short route with a lot of "tight" turns stacked up, so it often involved being told to turn onto a street and then to turn gain onto another one within 20 metres. The voice instructions coped well (prompting me at what felt like the "right" time as I walked) but the distance indivcators seemed to get lost. So, it would say "turn right into main street in _ miles" where the underscore indicates silence. I guess the 0.0X miles that the on-screen route info was showing is getting passed to eSpeak "as is" rther than as <x> miles <y> yards? I didn't test it with the distances set to Km rather than miles, will try later to se if it's an imperial-specific issue.

2. the on-screen guidance often involves te word "street" being abbreviated to "St." - eSpeak always pronounces this as "St" - I wonder if there's any way you can pass a "hint" to it to pronounce "Street" - it's perfectly intelligable as is, but it would be a nice enhancement if possible.

It was quite funny watching passers-by as I walked my route - I had the phone on speaker (forgot to bring my headphones) and I think a few people thought I had called Stephen Hawking to talk me through the route :-)

Please keep up the excellent work, modrana is fast becoming a very polished product, and the speed/quality of enhancement (and your in-depth feedback/discussion) are fantastic for us users :-)

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

wait till you go on a "peekway"...

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

I like modrana, since it's free software.

Three things make sygic better currently though.

- Voice navigation. Should be easy to fix through interfacing to espeak. I understand the author is already working on this.

EDIT: Oh looking at post 165, maybe I haven't updated, it seems the espeak interface is working. Am gonna give it whirl...

- Fix the display so that vehicle is on the bottom as in the standard nav, so you see what's in front of you. Autorotate, so you're always looking forward. Auto reroute, without touching any controls. Should be easy to fix.

- Internet access. Given you use nav often in places you're not familiar with, many of the times it's gonna be while abroad, which makes it impossible to use now, since it doesn't do routing and uses google routes, so the web access would cost a fortune abroad.

The last one is the biggest problem.

I think it should be fixable - for instance by interfacing to routing abilities of navit - also free software, or using its routing algorhythms, don't know.

Until the last one is implemented, sygic will still be significantly better for navigation, unless you never navigate abroad, or in roaming, and have an unlimited data plan.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

also one something is in poi is there any way to remove it?

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

So do I.

Yes, it seems it's already implemented, but right now I have no chance to test it.

Some of active tickets:
add automatic map rotation
rotate the map in the direction of travel -> direction of travel is on top
when the turn-by-turn navigation is active, move the position indicator down and show more of the map in the direction of travel
automatic rerouting

Yes, I have no Internet on N900 and thus cannot use some features of ModRana, like route (and therefore, voice navigation).

Concur.

Yes, it would be good if ModRana learned to understand, where roads and footpaths are situated, and to create routes without Google.

NavIt has too many dependencies, I do not dare even to install it.

Routing algorithms of NavIt could certainly be used; it's not necessary to reinvent the wheel.

I don't want to use a non-free program, even as a trial. So I use ModRana.

I could use NavIt, but I suppose that I don't like having all the map in a .bin file... And ModRana has comfortable interface... And I already have ModRana installed, while NavIt would require going through the dependencies again....

Right now, a feature request to MartinK: create a directory for .osm files (downloaded by user from OSM website or by application after user specifies what area he is interested in), let the application read them and use them for routing. I hope that either GTK+ or Python is comfortable with XML documents (*.osm).

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

The list of active tickets has been updated.
I closed the already solved tickets and added all the the feature requests and bugreports I could find. Let me know if there is something wrong or missing. :)

The POI functionality + its menu are going to be completely overhauled (sqlite for POI storage + better integration with other features like POI search and routing). This should happen quite soon, till then its not worthwhile to change anything concerning this feature.

For metric units, when the distance is shorter than 1 km, the unit is switched to meters. I guess I should also do this for the imperial units - switch to yards for distances that are shorter than a mile ?
Also separating the distance to major and minor units can be doable but some glitches, like "in 54 kilometers and 10 meters" need to be addressed first.

I am already preprocessing the routing messages, so I can just substitute every "St." for "Street" and "peekway" for "parkway". This can be also done for other terms, if you know any.

Yeah, I also got some funny looks from people when field testing this. :D

Thanks ! :)

Well, the fremantle buttons are just gray and in modRana they have whole two colors, "blue" and "navy blue". :D
But seriously, the buttons need to be distinct even in sunlight and from a distance, as in the case of car or bicycle navigation.
BTW, the buttons with just text on them are actually drawn directly with cairo, so color theming them could be quite easy. Buttons with icons are actually just square PNG images, and they unfortunately don't scale too well, especially when running modRana on highres screens on PC. As all the PNGs are already (manually) generated from a SVG file, I would like to replace them directly by SVG icons in the future.

I am actually looking at this right now. ModRana already supports portrait mode for all GUI modes, because NeoFreerunner, which is one of the other supported platforms, runs everything in portrait by default.

Well, yes, it is a bit against the fremantle GUI metaphor, but:

• you can easily go back to previous menu with your thumb when holding the N900 in your left hand
• in most default modes you can also access the main menu by your left thumb and navigate the map with your free right hand
• the fremantle style "back" buttons always seemed too small to me
• it is hardcoded in quite a few places :)
• all menu levels have the same simple and easily comprehensble structure
• it follows the ancient tradition of latin script, by adding elements in rows, from left to right, top down :)

Offline routing
If I can get some sort of library for this, as I really don't feel like writing it from scratch, this can be implemented. Also, there seem to be some programs that provide a web based routing service. If they are installable on the N900, the web service can be accessed through localhost and used for offline routing.

Some notes:

• the insane Google server farms are a bit more powerful than the N900, so getting the route may take some time, but it would still be better than never (and it may not be so bad in practice) :D
• unfortunately, plain OSM XML data can not be used (most probably because of the xml processing overhead) and every router uses its own (incompatible) binary format
• converting the xml to binary format can be quite resource intensive and might require a PC
• the OSM is being updated all the time, so some sort of update mechanism could be needed

It seems that both Gosmore and Routino work on N900 and could be theoretically interfaced with modRana.