Notices

Quick message...
First, if you open modrana-qml, and then lock screen and keys, it will regularly unlock-activate the screen - why?
Second, if you open modrana-qml, and switch to window-manager (where multiple windows are displayed), modrana-qml will close itself with Segmentation fault, quite quickly (well, no more than ten minutes).
Neither of these problems happens with modrana-gtk.
[Edit]You could also consider adding OpenSeaMap as one of layers.[/Edit]
Best wishes.
_________________
Per aspera ad astra...

Thanks a lot! I hope you'll be able to add it to GTK GUI too. First, it's still only one gui usable for real-life - second, GTK GUI have many fans (including me, I must say, that it like it more). There also more arguments against using QML - having GTK and QT bits loaded at the same time is memory hog, while we have GTK loaded anyway, due to Maemo. QT also fails at respecting hardware keyboard remap (3/4 special keys won't work), etc...

Not that I disregard work on QML GUI - it's just personal prefference to use GTK (reinforced by hard technical facts).

/Estel

Yesterday I turned on tracking on modRana and tried to listen to Someplayer at the same time. The problem was that the music playback was very broken up and unlistenable.

I tried cutting the logging to every 5s and saving every 15s but it made no difference. The music is on the external sd card (I notice the playback often gets broken when locking/unlocking the device, so it may be a player issue?).

The maps were pre-saved so there was no internet activity going on (or does modRana check with the server for versions?).

So, are there any other settings I could change to make the playback bearable, or would switching to a different music player work (a lot of my music is in ogg format, which limits choices a bit)?

Or, is there a lightweight tracking only map app that can export in a format that modRana can read?

Quick message...
I have created white versions of mode images (bus, car, cycle, train, walk). I use them in night theme; they fit especially well into QML interface, since other icons (fullscreen, current position) are also white, not black.
Best wishes.

There is GPS Recorder which can also convert to .gpx format which is readable by Modrana but I havent tried that. It doesnt have maps so it should use a bit less system resources (not loading maps etc.)

However as fellow someplayer user I noticed that as well. Its very easy to interupt by doing other things. I now regulary use Open Media Player and the stutter is much less, the default media player was better at playing in background as well. Something to do with the player engine if I remeber correctly.
I usually record music from streams and listen to it on the phone (offline) and the lower bitrate (128 or 96 kbit mp3 ) work fine
I also noticed .mp3 uses slightly less cpu compared to .ogg when playing music of about the same quality

Many thanks for that, I'll try out both.

The problem for me is I already had an sd card full of ogg music files from the last several years when I got my n900, so moving to mp3 will be a bit of a hassle.

I did wonder about trying just mplayer, but that will involve setting up scripts and shortcuts, which though I could do, will take some time too.

ModRana postpones screen blanking every 60 seconds, so that the screen stays on when you are using it. Looks like the Qt API for this (QScreenSaver I think ?) not only does this, but also unlocks the screen.

A check if the screen is locked will probably need to be added to the code.

There were some issues with segfaults caused by both GTK & GObject stuff and Qt stuff being loaded by modRana, but I think I have already fixed that one.

So this might be unrelated and quite possibly the cause can be somewhere inside Qt or PySide - BTW, someone got an idea how to debug a library that makes a Python application using it segfault ?

OK, noted.

Yeah, it shouldn't be that difficult.

At least short term, I plan to concentrate at the QML GUI to get it to feature parity with the GTK one. As I'll be also improving the general modRana data models while doing this, the GTK GUI should also benefit from this quite a bit.

BTW, at a glance, some + and - for the GTK and QML GUI:

GTK
+ has the most features
+ works even without CSSU
+ works on desktop (but is not very desktop like )
+ has the most features at the moment

- quite tedious to add new features due to lowlevel implementation
(The GTK GUI is written in Cairo, so for everynew layour or special button you
have to actually tell Cairo which lines, glyphcs and rectangles to draw and on which coordinates. You have a full control over the graphics, but it is really quite tedious. )
- no hardware acceleration, everything runs on CPU
-> the whole screen is redrawn every time (due to using Cairo for everything)
-> no kinetic scrolling
(well, there is this, integrating it with the fullscreen-Cairo-widget might be an issue)
- very old GTK version (not that big of a problem actually)
-> how long will be GTK 2 supported on desktop ?
- bad support for more recent mobile operating systems
-> basically no support for anything non-X
-> this rules out Android, BB10, etc.


QML
+ very fast and easy for UI development
-> mainly due to the build in elements and property bindings
(bindings save a HUGE amount of code)
+ fast, even on the N900
-> even the built-in Javascript interpreter is surprisingly fast
+ kinetic scrolling and animations are not a problem
+ good multi platform support
-> Harmattan, Android, BB10, etc.
(BTW, I have basically all I need to start making modRana packages for Android and later BB10 (BB10 has Python 3.2, which complicates things a bit))

- stability issues on the N900
-> also requires CSSU for proper functionality (PR 1.3 Qt is too outdated)
-> and that issue with loading two GUI libs to RAM
- Qt Components are usually unavailable on desktop
-> makes running the QML GUI on desktop problematic
- no Python bindings that support new Qt5 features
-> there seems to be some progress from both PyQt and PySide, but not timetable just yet
- QML/QtQuick lacks some important features and sometimes feels a little unpolished
-> no programmable imports (which is problematic if you want to support multiple component sets)
-> no really asynchronous image loading interface (the current implementation triggered by setting the async flag for Image is severally lacking)
-> no control over the image cache, no explicit cached image reloading
-> issues with nested data models
-> the PySide bindings sometimes have issue, for example with nested data models or automatic QObject wrapping

I have noticed the same issue and I think this happens because someplayer doesn't use the media framework (which uses the DSP and seems to be quite optimized) but runs the playback on CPU only. A modRana can also tax the CPU quite a lot (rendering the GUI, downloading tiles at once, checking if you are on route during navigation, etc.), the might both fight over the (single-core) CPU, which might result in interruptions in playback.

On the other hand, if modRana is not the active application, it should do that much even when logging (no GUI rendering & no tile downloads) and the playback should be OK.

Ive optimized the logging quite a bit last summer, so it is not incremental and should be quite light on resources.

If it can file the tiles locally, it won't do any online requests. You might also disable network usage completely in options->Network->Network usage.

So I would say - try the default media player and see if you have the same issues.

Nice, thanks !
I'll add them to the night theme + looks like I'll finally have to add theme switching to the QML GUI.

Maybe the DSP can't handle ogg so it is decoded by the CPU in both cases ?

Thanks for the extra information Martin.

I *think* Someplayer was the active application, but as I was setting both up at the same time, I might have that wrong. The problem was I didn't really have time to play around with it at the time or give the applications too long to settle down. Next time I should have.

I hope to do a test with an altered set-up today and/or over the weekend. I'll post back what happens.

Am I missing something, or is it not possible to route to anywhere on the N9? I go to the menu and both "Routes" and "Search" do nothing when tapped.