Notices

I also think the "select rectangle" thing is the best way to select downloaded area.

The reason I wish it worked in the device, instead of google earth etc, is because I am carrying the device around more often than a laptop, and it would be nice to be able to select the downloaded area when under wifi connection like in a coffee shop, before going out for a walk etc.. I do have a phone with 3G connection, but it eats a lot of battery when connected, so it is useful to be able to fetch the maps beforehand.

Would the drag-panning-with-stylus be too much work for the CPU to handle by the way?

//Tuomas

Small bug report:

The maps along a route have already been downloaded at zoom level 1. If the zoom level is then set to 0, 'Download maps along route' re-fetches the maps. It should not as zoom level 0 uses the same maps as zoom level 1.

If you need any help translating Mapper to danish, please let me know. Shouldn't be too much work, and even though I would prefer to stick to english myself I'm sure not all of my countrymen are of the same opinion.

Not quite true - it kicks off downloads of the same maps, yes, but none of the downloads actually occur because the maps have already been downloaded. Maemo Mapper does check that the maps exist, though, and since there are likely a lot of maps to "download" at zoom level 0, there are a lot of maps to verify exist. This may take some time, but it shouldn't be as much time as actually downloading them.

I totally agree that your patch clearly and undeniably facilitates this use case. I only said that this patch is useless (and actually cumbersome) for me because this is not my use case at all. I use Download-by-Area by bringing up the dialog and also firing up Google Earth (or Google Maps) on my computer. But not everyone uses it this way, which is why I added your patch.

Maemo Mapper v0.2.3 has been released to address issues in the Download-by-Area dialog box.

Device-Installable .DEB File
Source Code

Changelog:

* Fixed bug in Download-by-Area confirmation dialog box.
* Added "Clear" button to Download-by-Area dialog box.

I open a short (15 miles) route for which I have already got the maps at zoom 1 on the N770. When I download maps along this route at zoom 1 then it finishes in a flash without any windows popping up (probably checking if maps exist and then exits). Next I zoom in to level 0 and download maps along the route, it thinks for a while and then brings up the small window with the progress bar showing that it is downloading the maps. It takes minutes to finish so I think it is doing more than just checking if maps exist.

The announcement of a waypoint is left out consistently along my usual route and the little man inside stops talking after this for the rest of the route... What is the tolerance level of deviating from the route before it stops announcing waypoints? Is this adjustable? If Reset-ing the route is the answer then is there a quick (safe) way to do that other than through the menu?

gnuite, you've done something remarkable with this program...

The following patch adds support for rfcomm to maemo-mapper. One of the goals of the patch was a minimal number of changes. Clearly the reuse of the first character of _rcvr_mac as an indicator of the type of connection is a hack. It's more reasonable to set a state variable _rcvr_conn to one of:
depending on whether _rcvr_mac has 1) colons, 2) slashes, or 3) dots in it respectively.

That said, it works. Instead of a mac address in the Settings...GPS/MAC, you use /dev/rfcomm0 or /dev/rfcomm1, or whatever. No more mysterious bluetooth silence.

http://russnelson.com/maemo-mapper-0.2.3-rfcomm.patch

Thanks for a great program! I admire programmers that write elegant programs that solve the problem, while still keeping things simple and minimalistic. That said, here are some suggestions for more code :-)

I have started converting sea charts to "google format" so I can keep track of my shipmates from my bunk. Works like a charm besides the obvious projection issues, but as long as I dont go too far north, the difference between mercator and gaussian isn't too bad. I'm not planning on using the N770 for any critical navigational decisions anyway.

After playing with google maps for a while, I noticed that the gps position often has a systematic error in some direction. It would be useful to be able to "nudge" the map to some known reference point (a suggestion would be by dragging the waypoint or gps dot to the reference point or something - similar to Atlas for the Palmpilot). The gui looks to be the easy part however, since the systematic error seems to be different depending on zoom-level and depending on where you are. Problem is, how do you store and reuse the calibration - and worst of all - how do you keep things lightweight. Still, it would be a nice feature, and one that coincidentally would help me fix my projection issues somewhat. ;-)

On the information pane you're considering, would it be possible to include the lat/lon coordinates for the currently shown map center? It would make it possible to verify some rough validity of any homegrown map without having to actually go there.