Notices

The tap delay is not that protracted for me, tho I am overclocked.

I tried Modrana for driving the other day. I really liked having espeak help me out. But there are two things I'd like to see (haven't looked at the Python yet to see how hard they are):

1. Speed-sensitive directions. I get enough advance notice of turns on city streets, but on the motorway I don't hear the warning soon enough to get into the proper lane.

2. Font-size control in themes. I wanted to make an "old eyes" theme to make up for my deteriorating vision, but right now you can only control colors...

Martin, modRana currently supports rotation between portrait and landscape, but only in the tablet (keyboard below) and phone (speaker on top) position.

Would it be possible to at least also support reverse phone, so that the USB connector is at the bottom? I needed to charge and navigate today, and resorted to landscape since portrait looked plain silly with the connector on top. And even in landscape, it wasn't at a convenient location, causing the cable to dangle too close to the gear changer...

Other than that, modRana did well

Tomorrow I'm gonna be driving over a 1000km so am anxious to see how modrana does at high speeds now, if it'll be able to update the display etc and not hog memory and CPU... :O)

Yeah, the delay seems to vary. Might have skipped a redraw request somewhere - I'll have to check.

This is definitely planed. I'm going to add some more hardcoded notices for longer stretches - but the delays should be ultimately user configurable. I'm also planing time-to-turn based triggering, which is basically what you describe as the time would be based on recent average speed.

Good point - I'll see what I can do.
The situation is like this - modRana already tries to stuff the largest font that fits while respecting its aspect ratio on the buttons under the icon. It would be possible to theme these ratios - eq. smaller icon, more place for text.
Concerning the various text boxes - there is again not much to do as most of them are already quite full. Implementing them as a proper (scrollable ?) text view would probably help. Concerning the navigation info box - I agree, the text is usually too small to be readable and I'm working on solving this somehow - textwrapping, or just using big text size and cutting the overflow. I'll probably do both and set what works best as default.
And, adding support for theming font type should be easy.

ModRana currently uses (as most other Python apps on N900) the modified GPodder script for automatic rotation from this thread.
The actual rotation is IMO done by the window manager, so for modRana it is just a window resize, the click coordinates, etc. are translated automatically. Provided the the window manager supports more rotation modes, adding support for them would be easy. If it does not support them, it would be harder. It's easy to draw the GUI upside down but some sort of screen coordinate translation would probably need to take place. Also, when not in full-screen, there would be a silly upside down menu bar.

Nice ! I'm looking forward to your findings!

Some things you can try if/when you hit some issues:

• download tiles beforehand if the route is known
• experiment with sqlite/files for tile storage
• disable saving of downloaded tiles in options->map->tile storage
• disabling map rotation and/or map overlay, as both are currently quite resource intensive and not fully optimized (map overlay should be as fast as normal map rendering as soon as I implement caching of the composited tiles)
• delete the database files in case they got somehow corrupted
• tweak the number of automatic tile download threads in options->network>network usage

Also, good luck on your travels !

I was preparing a trip, and just browsing some location, so no cached tiles, everything needed to be downloaded as I was dragging the map around. Some things I noticed:
- when dragging a lot, I was greeted with a screen full of blue squares, tiles waiting for a slot. Took quite some time for them to get a slot and draw a map.
- same for zooming in/out: lots of tiles waiting for a slot.

I thought the visible tiles had priority? Or maybe they are all busy downloading, are slow, and thus need so much time. I guess aborting the download would be an option if the tile is no longer visible?

I updated to the latest version and found a few interesting things:

If I turned off the route it gave me no warning or information on how to get back to the route. This is could a good thing some times, but a big problem other times.

I downloaded many tiles into the sqlite data base, but it didn't seem to be able to access them while driving.

Also some times it didn't tell me to turn until after the turn. Should I turn off the screen rotation or something to give it more processing power.

@MartinK: I also like the 'Map Screen' in the power button menu; however, it would be more user-friendly(ihmo), that an on screen 'goto-map-screen' button is implemented at each level of the menu screen.

I have just discovered that I am able to have two copy/instance of modRana running at the same time and these instances seem to be independent of each other. Is it by design?

Cheers,

This is one of the big things I am waiting for, too: automatic route recalculation.