Notices

You might have noticed that modRana V0.19-1 was released a few days ago.

What's new ?

• multi-mode screen backlight control
  I finally got to implementing this, the different modes are more or less the same as in Mappero. BTW, any ideas for some new ones ? I have used dbus for controlling the screen and more dbus-using features, like pausing the media player (which was proposed a while ago) while espeak is speaking, are planed.
• street names with Cyrillic characters are now pronounced in Russian
  This wasn't so hard to do after all. Seems to work quite reliably too.
  
• navigation is now auto-started by default
  
• speed per hour for metric units is now shown correctly
  Finally found the culprit, a malformed condition cause that kilometers were being converted to miles.
  
• the last navigation step ("you should be near the destination") is now correctly displayed
  
• searching for extremely long roads now works correctly
  
• substitution rules for directions (from that special CSV file) should now correctly handle Unicode and actually apply on all routing messages
  I have also added a few new default rules for substituting the Czech and Russian abbreviations for "street".

Quick reply...
Feature request: in GPS, along with On and Off, add third option: Ask. So that when Modrana wants to turn on GPS, it asks me whether it's needed.

For sure.

I'd also recommend including the possibility to save and load routings. Until a local routing search is implemented, this would at least partially enable you to route abroad, without incurring monstrous costs. I.e. you're planning a vacation in some city, you know you're gonna have to drive to some place and back, for instance, so you do the routing where you have free access, and then save it, and then do other routes and save them, and then when you need them, you load them.

Come to think of it, what would be great is if you'd include the possibility to download tiles around the route for a couple of levels. I.e. now you can do it around a point, but if you know where you'd be going, you could just download around the route within say a couple of hundred meters, and that way you could also prepare for a trip. This'd definitely be great help again when abroad.

You're my hero man, for programming this. Before you, there was only navit as means for free (as in freedom) navigation software, and it sucks bigtime, segfaulting and all. Modrana is a great breakthrough for the free software world...

It seems some of this you've already implemented, I just discovered there is the download around route option... Woah, GREAT!!!

Can you save and load routings / not sure this is the same as tracks?

when will this be promoted to extras-testing?

Great application! Would you consider integrating functionality from my thread about Itinerer Support?

HAM seems to treat them as required. I don't use fapman, so have no idea how that handles it.

Looks like 1.19 doesn't cause it to happen any more. I tried it on the way to work today and it loaded just fine...

Yes, I'm following at least two, but the main one appears to be here.

[/QUOTE]
I like the third option (and think it will help). I also would like to propose the following: Trigger on not just the current point, but the point after it. This way, even if it's still focused on a point behind us, once we pass the next point it will auto-fix itself.

I dislike using one of the buttons for a fix for this though. I would think adding a widget/button to the lower right stack of route buttons would work well for this. (eg "Jump to next point" or "skip this point") It would also allow one to jump to a turn 3 or 4 ahead to trigger on too, and make "robo-phone" quiet during a sequence of turns one already knows well.

I like those options, and highly vote for a restore route on restart. Especially now that there's a top-level button for "clear current route".


Now for the bug list:

So over the holiday, I took modRana on a trip with me, about 800 miles round trip. I found a couple small bugs on the way, three of which were real problems:

1> Despite spending lots of time downloading tiles, when I was in an area that I know downloaded, local tiles were not used. If I turned off (or lost) GSM, I got the "download failed" tiles. And if I switched my data plan setting to "only vital info" I got a grey background. I even had wifi for one stop in the trip, and downloaded tiles for a 20k radius. It said it got all the tiles (and my free space dropped by 200M), but on starting it up and driving, I got the same thing. I have sqlite turned on, and the database files seem to be ok / intact and about the right size. Any ideas?

2> After some points I started getting an odd "blinking" when going over 50MPH. It seemed to happen when I was in an area where I only had GSM2.0 (not EDGE or 3G). The screen would draw, but then would go blank (no title bar or map or anything). The GPS would fall behind during this, and the whole device would become non-responsive. After I'd slowed (under 30mph) or stopped for a short time, it would return to normal.

3> The text in the box seemed to change size randomly, more based on how long the text was. In may cases it was so tiny as to be illegible unless looked VERY closely at the device. Thankfully I didn't have to rely on it much, since the voice announcements are now happening more frequently and with more fore-warning.

Of course, I was driving and didn't turn on debugging, so I have no logs for any of this. :P And I updated to 1.19 just before the trip, so it's the current version.

One more thing to check out: Not sure if modRana is hitting a processing wall (though it seems it may be). This may be something to check out to see if modRana could benefit from it. It compiles python code in to platform specific executable code, and can really speed things up. At least one other app on the N900 is using it.


Overall, this trip modRana really did a great job. Minus the tile cache issue, everything went well, and the announcments worked like a charm. (I love the warning a couple miles out btw, much better.)

I have been using modRana on two hiking trips past weekend (using tracklog), and while it operated very well the first day, it let me down a bit on the second day. For some reason, the battery usage was almost double, and I could see it drain the battery in no time. A completely full battery went dead in less than 3 hours, where the previous day still had about 40% left. But on the previous day I also used routing with voice navigation, which I didn't on day 2.
What I did do on day 2 before leaving was loading the tracklog of day 1 on the map as a reference. Could this have caused more drain?

PS: this is with a very recent version, if somebody tells me where I can see the version number I will mention it here too.

EDIT: upgrading it showed the installed version is 0.19-1, now installing 0.19-3 from extras-Devel

Just after installing the latest version (0.19-3), I noticed some gpx files under log and misc. Since I cleared out my tracklogs, and they are from a location I've never been, I assume they came with the install.

- Can these be removed from the package?
- Can you add an option under Tools to delete the tracklog
- Can you add an option to set the location where tracklogs get stored, so I can reach them via USB (copy to PC)?

By the way... WHAT HAVE YOU DONE to modRana???

It (0.19-3) has become MUCH faster suddenly, the menus are so much more responsive. YAY!