Notices

An idea for the next version:

How about a fancy interface for address entering and lookup? My TomTom GPS shows a list of known streets for a certain city, making it easy to pick the right one, even if I don't know the spelling 100%.

Maybe some frontend to Google to feed back suggestions if the entered name isn't found.

MartinK, OT:
Have you any estimation how many hours total you have spent with modRana? (planning, coding, testing, support)

The general feeling among the developers who know many programming languages and platforms, is that Python would be about 4x as productive as C++ development or 2x as productive as Java-development.

As for now already, I am sure everyone can see how rapid this modRana development has been compared to for example Mappero and Marble.

So would be interesting and educational to know some working hours estimates.

0.23-1 updated

Yep, modRana V0.23-1 is out !

What's new ?

• new optional map dragging technique
  This is basically a very simple and fast trick - it takes the current screen content and blitts it with an offset back on screen during drag.
  As a result, ares not currently visible are not redrawn until the drag ends. It also takes everything thats was on screen, including for example menu buttons.
  This feature is targeted mainly on slower devices, like the Neo FreeRunner, where it is now set as default and finally makes map scrolling usable.
  On Maemo, you can enable simple map dragging in option->map->dragging.
  
  There might still be some middle-ground between continuous redraw and simple map dragging, that might be more pretty and fast, but I will probably rather start working on the long promised Clutter integration.
  
  
• long press on the "escape" arrow in the upper left corner jumps directly to the map screen
  To enable this, I actually had to add support for handling long-presses, which will be soon used to add a on-map context menu for fast POI creation (and other uses).
  
  Also, there might be some menus where this does not work yet, please report such menus, so I can fix them
  
• threshold for disabling centering by dragging can be now configured in options->map->centering
  You can even turn this off, so centering can be only disabled by clicking the centering toggle button.
  
• scrolling in options and that black-screen issue should be both fixed

Also introducing, the ultimate benchmark !
detailed modRana startup timing
Just start modrana from xterm to get this in terminal during startup.

Thats it for today, I'll handle all the accumulated questions tomorrow

First check which tile storage method are you using in options->map->Tile storage. You want to use the "files" or else ("sqlite") modRana will looks only in its sqlite tile database and will ignore all tile files and folders.

Also try to check if the tile structure you get from is the same as the one used by modRana in the other folders.

There should be no problems with the lower zoomlevels (modRana actually currently has no lower limit on zoomlevel number ).

Also, to check if modRana is actually using your tiles, you can disable automatic map tiles download by setting network usage to "only for important data" in options->network->network usage. If new tiles show up after setting this, they are loaded from local storage.

ModRana currently simply logs to stdout, so you can just start it from xterm and look at the output it produces. The output can be also saved to a per-session log file.

I took a second look on the modRana code that stops redrawing when the window is minimized and/or the screen is blanked. Turned out I forgot stop the function for invalidating the window content - the redrawing was paused but the X-server was still getting damage events.

This should be now fixed in V0.23-1, also, as a result of this, the thumbnail in task switcher is no longer black - it just freezes on the last shown frame.

So there should now be no graphic related activity originating from modRana when the modRana window is not visible - so please let me know if you still get those freezes when modRana is minimized or the screen is blanked

You mean that during the turn by turn navigation, the voice says the "in 8 meters do something" but the actual distance is much longer ? How much longer ?

Yes, this would be possible to add - espeak provides multiple slightly different male and female voices. But I still think the default voice sounds the best

Yeah, the "modes" are pretty much work in progress. The basic idea is to have an optimal interface for each use case. This means mainly a configurable per-mode UI elements layout. You might want larger zoom buttons while driving the car but not the route elevation widget you use while mountain-biking, etc.

The modes are currently also used while looking up routes - note how you get different routes when you are in the walking vs car modes

So the first step is to make the interface interactively configurable & make the widgets usable again.

I was also thinking about per-mode specific settings, like: Scale the map to 4x original size, but in only in the car and bus modes, in bike mode only by 2X and use the default for all other modes.

Definitely planned (with a quite high priority too ) - modRana has all the needed data available through the Google geocoding service (note how there is an estimated start and destination address for P2P routesa lready), I just basically need to extend the UI to show it.

Hmm, I don't really know - but I would say it would be, all combined, quite a few hundred hours since I started working on modRana a year ago.

Yes, from my experience, Python is definitely more productive that C/C++.

Its just so flexible and fast to write in - no unnecessary semicolons or parentheses, simple and readable syntax, flexible type system, huge but nice organized standard library...and so on

I also tend to start modRana all the time during development to incrementally test the code, so lack of compiling saves a lot of time & and makes the whole process more streamlined. It also means no esoteric tool-chain issues on different platforms - once some brave soul compiles Python + PyGTK for a platform, modRana can run on it. Although Java is also multi-platform, its such a monster I have yet to see a native mobile program written in it - or even an official JVM port for ARM (I'm excluding Android/Dalvik because it is not multiplatform). Consider how many Python programs are there in Maemo alone...

The lack of compiling is also a plus during testing - I just rsync my current development version from my devel. PC to the N900 or FreeRunner and can test how it behaves right away.

Of course, this is not totally black and white - not all libraries have Python bindings, while most have a C interface (I will be probably doing a simple CLI interface for Monav due to this soon .

There are no ifdefs, which would be nice for printing debugging info without slowing down the release version with a million of ifs processed on runtime.

And there are some nice/dirty tricks that can be done when accessing the memory directly - GTK is probably using some of them internally for drawable->drawable drawing, and the new simple map dragging mode is thus very fast as result.

And native Python is slow - well, when compared to well written C. This is why I use well written C all the time in modRana - by using the Python standard library, which is from a large part written in C or has less-flexible-but-fast C versions for some modules written in Python (like Marshal vs cMarshal, etc.).

But Python is also not slow enough to matter in most cases - my profiling output shows, that modRana is already spending most of the time in GTK and Cairo, and all the python code is hardly visible in the call chart

Well, I actually think the progress is quite slow, considering the mountan of feature request, all the nice online services and data sources that could be integrated ...
Then I do a monthly progress report to the lab and after looking at all the features that were implemented since last time ("wow, did I really implement all of this ?" ), , the tempo doesn't seem that bad for a while

Concerning development speed of other projects - well, all the time spent on typing braces, solving esoteric compile problems and memory leaks is time not spent on development

But what is the real reason I originally choose Python for this project ?
Well, that's simple.

WOW

Already grabbing my n900 with modRana first, leaving the tomtom for when my wife needs gps

@MartinK
I have the latest version downloaded and the maps were set to google.I wanted to download tiles around 40 kms. From my home wifi I started to download but when i saw the size, i wanted to stop downloading but Modrana froze.It happened repeatedly.
@All
kindly consider this noob and explain me how to download goolgle maps from gmap catcher.i could manage them to be downloaded but i dont know where they are being downloaded in my UBUNTU system.Plus are there any specifications for zoom level?

your help is greatly appreciated.. regards

I love how far voice synthesis has come in the last 20 years, sounds marginally better than the currah microspeach on my zx spectrum

But hey, that is eSpeaks fault I guess, the rest of things is sweet in this software. Still not a viable replacement for my tomtom though.

I'm doing contract work for a company called Nuance, who deliver the TTS to all major players (including TomTom). I hear their output all the time, and it makes me say that eSpeak is utter crap It is decades behind commercial offerings.