Thanks a lot to everyone for your support!

I've successfully defended my thesis and also passed successfully the masters exam, finishing the Applied Informatics masters study program on the Faculty of Informatics of the Masaryk University in Brno.

BTW, my thesis is available if full from the official thesis page, but it is completely in Czech.

I made some quite extensive tables comparing most of the current mobile platforms for the thesis, so I'm thinking of putting those tables to some publicly editable wiki (like the Maemo one) and maintaining theme there. Also some articles based on material from the thesis might show up in the future.

tl;dr:
I now have a Mgr. title and can get back to modRana development.

I'll first go through the bugreports, add them to the Github issue tracker (BTW, the issue tracker on modrana.org is still fully functional, but quite PITA to use because of the antispam measures added due to TRAC targeting spambots) and start at fixing them. I'll also have to get local packaging for Harmattan set up - I've been using the MeeGo COBS for that, but you might have noticed that it got recently shut down.

I see that as the main big feature for this summer, like offline routing was last year. Certainly won't be easy, but preliminary research shows it should be doable.

The currently planed "design" looks like this:

• OpenStreetMap data, preferably in PBF as that is very fast to parse, is converted to a format suitable for rendering
• this format would be basically like the current sqlite tile database, but instead of an image each tile would hold geometry covering the given tile
  Kothic already supports this, but without sqlite - just A LOT of plaintext files.
• the Kothic renderer will get geometry from the sqlite db and draw it to bitmap tiles
  Kothic draws the maps based on a MapCSS style sheet - so one OSM data set can be used to render different map layer styles (day/night/car or pedestrian optimized). Or the data can be filtered to suit a particular style, making the data set much smaller.
• these tiles would be displayed as usual and should work out of the box with both GTK and QML GUIs
  Or even making modRana act as a tileserver - but first things first, it will be a long road.