Notices

dbus, see http://maemo.org/api_refs/5.0/5.0-fi.../fmtx_api.html actually not sure if that is used to send output. http://wiki.maemo.org/N900_FM_radio_transmitter might be more relevant.

Thank you, MartinK!

I am setting up my N900 after a full reflash and I am in the process of installing applications. When I set up modRana, I will add this in the Wiki, probably tonight or tomorrow.

I see, that sounds great! Having a builtin POI database would mean modRana would be a fully offline GPS solution for me (and it's not far from it the way it is, frankly.

I have no idea about this, sorry. I will investigate in a few days and tell you if I find something.

I have a few ideas for features/enhancements. Far from being criticisms, I think the fact that I've been using modRana a lot due to it being the best GPS routing program for the N900 hands down, got me thinking...

1. This is related to the last question about the FM transmitter. Perhaps there could be a toggle (under Options, under Voice, or in the main map). This would cause modRana to open a stream into PulseAudio and send silence into it (if that is possible). This is more elegant than having to do the hack manually from Media Player or some other program. You could either sense when the FM transmitter is active, or just make the whole thing manual. I think this wouldn't interfer with any other audio streams. And this solution is a fallback in case you can't implement the solution you proposed.

2. Night Mode! Or custom visual mode, customizable by the user.
Basically, allow the user to customize graphic filter settings to alter the way map tiles look. For a simple Night Mode you could invert colors, for example. When this mode is engaged, tiles are buffered and processed before being displayed, and possibly also saved for later use if the user chooses that. You could also offer a batch preprocess mode so that the alternate set of tiles can be processed ovcernight, similarly to how tiles are downloaded now for offline routing.

The simple version of this feature is just "Invert Colors" and call it "Night Mode". This feature would be super useful for all the non-satellite maps. Those maps have tiles which don't occupy too much space either.

For the Satellite maps, a set of specific filters would be amazingly useful, if applied in batch mode. I'm thinking about filters geared to lower the size of each tile considerably without too much quality loss. Dithering, pixelization, color depth reduction, etc. If you allow a user to adjust this and look at a preview, then batch processing and replacing tiles would save a lot of space on the satellite maps. Just a guess, I don't know hjow optimized the satellite tiles already are.

3. Route simulator. This would simulate a route on the map (possibnly at a speed adjustable by the user.

But most importantly: then we could fool Google Maps and other providers so that batch downloads don't fail. As you know, batch downloads don't currently work with Google Maps because they must easily detect that a batch download is taking place, based on the pattern of tile requests. If you simulate the correct pattern, I think this wouldn't be an issue.

I thought of some other features but they don't come to mind right now.

thp's article about it:

http://thpmaemo.blogspot.com/2013/07...n-on-qt-5.html

And a video (linked in the article) of pyOtherSide on the N9, with Python 3 and QT 4:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqphTKirkKw

Edit: just noticed you've already commented on that article, so it might not be helpful.

modRana 0.49.6 has been released!
Brings support for debug log compression, faster Qt 5 GUI startup and keep-screen-on support for Sailfish OS.

Changelog:

Has it? Something choking somewhere?

From the changelist, I assume it has but only for Sailfish. The last Maemo build listed here is 0.49.4.

Yeah, 0.49.5 and 0.49.6 didn't have any user visible changes outside of the Qt 5 GUI so I did not send them to autobuilder.

Erm, any progress in cairo-related bugs? ModRana still crashes on me all the time, with the latest version from -devel

No pressure,all understanding and thankfulness.

/Estel

oh.. I thought that python speedup you mentioned was for all devices

I have recently added a set of tunables that might influence the crashes:
https://github.com/M4rtinK/modrana/issues/52

The general idea is that one can either set them to a lower value than default and the crashes might not trigger or do the opposite and try to find a reproducible crash scenario that could be used to find the root cause.

Also note that the non-default values are kinda experimental & some non-default value combinations might result in weird behavior.

So the general recomendation is to backup ~/.modrana before playing with them & to have the debug log (Options->Debug->Logging) enabled at all times to catch any interesting errors.

The slowness on Sailfish OS was caused by incorrect Python bytecode being generated (for 3.3 vs the 3.4 used on Sailfish).
The Maemo package has been using the same technique for ages to make startup faster.

On the other hand I've also spotted a few more opportunities to make general modRana startup faster on all platforms, usually by deferring stuff done during startup for later or mooving it to threads.
So you can look forward to more generally usable startup speed improvements in a future modRana update.