Mapviewer status

July 14th, 2006, 06:29 Posted By: deniska

It has been awhile since the last blog update. A few people inquired on the status of this development, so here is the info:

The project is still very much active.
I desided to re-write it from scratch since the previous version was too buggy and limited in functionality. I went away from SDL graphics libs - they exibited very unpredictable behavior and switched to custom graphics lib, mostly borrowed from lua player.
Furthermore, I desided to dump yahoo as the map donnor (with it's US & Canada only coverage) and start milking Google maps.
Google has worldwide map coverage, better map graphics and more of less open API for map manipulation.

I am pretty much done with scaling, xy <==>lat/lon conversion, basic attractions display, NMEA sentences parser, scripts to acquire maps
The new version has support for regular, satelite and hybrid maps...
I was able to load and display a farely large map:
40000sq km at street level resolution with 8 zoom levels. The size of it got pretty big: ~550MB.. but memory sticks are getting cheap nowdays :-)
The map interface and behavior are very similar to Google maps...


I am still waiting for my GPS order (Holux GPSlim236) to arrive, so I could start working on GPS connectivity...
If everything goes well I should be able to release a more or less stable version in a week or two, so keep checking the site :-)

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