Notices

I just added my layout to the wiki along with screenshots. I will end up tweaking the setup more, I'm sure. I hadn't even thought of adding additional text like dwould did.

gerritv -
if you are thinking about having Quit added to the first menu screen, would it make sense to have current location (for finding poi's etc near you) and/or bookmarks (for quick access as a destination) on the first screen as well? Just a thought. Maybe Town instead of one of these?

Anyone else have an opinion on this?

Also any chance of getting the hard buttons to work with the internal gui like they do with the gtk version?

The hard buttons (+ and -) will work as part of one of my (not yet in SVN) patches. The scroll pad and center button (on LH of screen) should already work. The center button is same as tapping on the screen. I did not hook up the Fullscreen button though. Personally I think Zoom +, - and FS are best done using OSD Buttons, much safer while driving.

I will try to mock up something in the next few days for the internal UI changes.
I did look into adding the N800 keyboard to Internal, but the keyboard relies on GTK which is definitely not part of GUI/Internal. Town/search is difficult for me to try because my city's OSM seems to have very little of this information.

Re performance, my guess (and it was sort of mentioned on #navit) is that reducing the number of tags you are looking to display is a good thing to do. E.g. if you are not interested in showing Stop signs on your map, then remove that item from navit.xml. These things all take time to find and render.
As a test of how busy Navit can be, set debug navit to level 1 or 2. Then send the output to a file using 2> log.file. This will likely show 80000 plus lines of output by the time the map displays, much of it Attr searches. So the advice above would seem to bear out the benefits of reducing your conf file. Other than that it will take using a tool such as Valgrind to determine code hotspots. Perhaps reducing the rate of GPS updates will help, I am just guessing on that though.

Awesome, its' working now. Thanks a lot, this is after about a week long struggle of trying to get locally stored maps working on this device. I should mention that I actually paid for a license for Wayfinder which has produced nothing so far (their website's a mess, no clear install process), Navit is the one actually working now.

This is especially great because I got this tablet in order to create an app for delivery order tracking & signature capture, now it looks like I actually might be able to integrate a mapping system in with that.. I'll post my progress on all that in another thread. It will start as soon as the OtterBox 2600 comes in the mail (mostly to protect it from the customers, but also the weather).

in the meantime I'll be using it for day to day address finding -- with a traditional map book as a backup, of course. so thank you very much.

I've tried removing a lot of the POI's that I'm not interested in. and it doesn't make a particularly notable impact on performance. My main issue is that actually whilst driving it can get quite laggy from your actual position (particularly if you drive off the planned route and it has to recalculate)
I was wondering if there are any optimizations to be had in tuning what gets rendered. I don't know how the logic figures out what it is rendering or how much to do, but if you could for instance say only render my route plus roads at most 2 removed from my route. that might help. eg less detail but just what you need.
Also I have no idea how the rendering is done, is it possible there are faster alternatives?
Basically I feel that the n810 should have enough grunt to do a smooth job, but it does not. I'm hoping that's a question of programming rather than hardware limitation.

gerritv-

I agree, + , - , fullscreen would be better from the osd for driving. I was really thinking that I would leave +/- on the screen, but remove the fullscreen button. I don't usually change that when driving, mostly when testing at home.

Thanks for the help with the new "text" boxes. I got it setup and working for the drive home yesterday, but dwould beat me to posting.

Navit is really getting to be usable. I think that the max speed displayed for a street is coming from the street/speed in navit.xml. I find that this is inaccurate on most of the street I regularly travel.. For instance, the main road I travel from my house to the expressway has a 40mph speed limit. It is listed as "street_1_city" from OSM which is then defined as having a 10kph limit in navit. I actually changed that to 30kph for routing purposes.

Edit

I would hope that there are enough guts in the hardware to work well. TomTom's and other GPS run similar hardware and are pretty smooth. Even my Palm TX w/ 480x320 and minimal ram worked well.

I wonder if it is just the screen resolution that is hurting us. Is it possible to use the hardware scaling features to get 400x240 instead of 800x480 (as an option perhaps)?

Does anyone know how to change the default country? The GUI keeps defaulting to UK making the app crash when searching for a route by town as I do not have a map of the UK. If this is not possible does anyone know how to put is_in tags into the navit app or map so it recognises what country it is?
My previous posting was a serious one, when I downloaded the application there is a file in there called knobhead" when I open it, it is just lots of numbers and letters very strange.

casper

You need to set your coordinates, look for the line that reads:
<navit center="add your coordinates here"


I used google earth to center on my house and got 2 sets of numbers (latitude and longitude) in the format: DD degrees MM min SS.SSSS seconds. However Navit needs the number in DD.dddd degrees * 100 = DDdd.dd degrees.

I don't have any knobhead files in my navit directory. Maybe you should uninstall and then re-install Navit and see if that helps.

Alternately, you could scroll the map to a location near you by hand, add a bookmark for use later. The look in the bookmark file (in /home/user/.navit directory) You should see a line for your bookmark starting mg: xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx copy this part of the line into the center.txt file overwriting the other numbers in the file.

This should start the map at that location, if not, you have a hand bookmark to use.

My understanding of the code is that you need to have an active GPS signal for the Town etc search to work. Otherwise it uses the default country from $LANG. Which might not have anything to do with the country that you are actually in. But I could be wrong of course in how I read the code :-)

Gerrit

Incase anyone is interested... I found some info on using includes in the navit xml file. So I've added someinfo to the wiki about switching the OSD items with an include line which pulls them in from a separate navitOSD.xml file. I'm hoping this will make it easier for me to try out various OSD layouts and drop them in place without having to edit the file by hand.


just to make life a little easier I also decided to create a page off of my blog
http://danielwould.wordpress.com/navit-stuff/
which contains some layouts as just blocks of OSD xml with no interspersed text so that it is easy to just cut'n'paste ones into files to play with.Sadly neither the navit wiki nor my wordpress blog seem to want to let me upload xml files, or even zip files. So this seemed a workable solution so far.
At the moment I just have my original layout, Lemmyslenders generally nicer layout. And my slight tweaks on that to satisfy my need for bigger text ;-)