I got already some requests for easy route planning inside Mapparium, for me thats not so important, because mostly I just drive without a plan. But it’s funny to play around. In fact I plan both ways of planning, online search „from to“ and manual planing by defining some points. But first make the online search, rather easy with „YOUR“. Sadly the by turn announcements are only supplied as text wit no relations to the route. That means you cannot click onto a announcement and zoom to the map where it should happen. I found another one from the university of Heidelberg, and it has map coordinates for every turn. But today when I tried to implement it’s offline :-O I’m a little bit hesitated to include such a service, if it is this unstable to use. Especially because it’s not just offline, but just lagging some minutes to timeout, which is very annoying, because it looks like the application is crashed. (But just waiting for the answer.)
New Version of Mapparium for all Amiga systems.
Most important changes are, AREXX Port (not available on AROS, due to Zune restriction), Find by IP, Check position, localized search and support for Garmin FIT data. Have fun for me it works already better than my other route inspector programs, I also use it on Linux as my default. I just notice when adding many routes it becomes a litte messy, because the start of every route is the same, maybe I need an option to hide routes from the view.
Changes:
ADD: Clear HD Cache by Button in Prefs to a certain zoom level
ADD: Find current position (by ip)
ADD: Search position by ip (type: ip:x.x.x.x to search)
ADD: Get address for current position
ADD: Zoom in by double mouse click
ADD: AREXX port with commands „goto“ and „addwaypoint“
Polluks wrote a little AREXX script to extract positions from JPG exif informations to show on the map, it also create geo: URIs suitable for Mapparium. He also asked me if it would be possible to include AREXX support directly to Mapparium. I always played with the idea to try some AREXX support things, but never had a reason. In principle is rather easy to get a message and return a error value.
I added two simple commands to Mapparium, goto and addwaypoint.
Mapparium with AREXX
At AROS sadly I didn’t get the AREXX (or Regina) to work, thats the reason I implement for Amiga Classic at the moment.
Strange problem appeared with Mapparium on AmigaOS4, all texts are invisible. The funny thing: on my UAE and the OS4 computer at Amiga meeting it was working, difficult to debug. But thanks to some guys at amiga.org I was able to solve it. First I thought it was some Font issue but then I found an informations about color setting in AmigaOS4 and that the given color also contains an alpha value and this was of course always zero for my setting now. MorphOS/AROS/Amiga does not need there a value. And after a failed try (I missed one call) I got a positive feedback from Amiga.org.
Besides this I fixed some little things and implemented Garmin tcx reading (also a xml format but seems only for tracks). Because of this I decided to make a new release for all platforms not only for AmigaOS4 and called it 0.3.
Mapparium 0.3
OpenStreetMap viewer for all Amiga systems.
0.3
FIX: Invisible texts on OS4
FIX: Go offline if internet is down
FIX: Start folder for load/save dialogs
FIX: Filter for dialogs
FIX: Version informations
ADD: Load tracks from Garmin TCX files
ADD: Set size of middle marker
ADD: Support for geo: URIs
ADD: DblClick to lower panel copies middle position to clipboard as geo: URI
I optimized Mapparium drawing a little bit for 68k Amiga at least in UAE it’s working now with reasonable speed (even faster than the native OS4 I tried). On a real Amiga of course will be much slower. I do not have a Graphics card (which is needed for this program). Maybe later I find one to test.
Working on the Mapparium, implementing an view for the height and speed curve of a track. The new TAChart component became much more powerful the last years. Now one also can add multiple Y-Axis so different scaling for two curves.
When you click on a track (single mouse click) it shows the curves for this track with the time as x-axis and height and speed as y-axes. I’m not sure if the distance would be a better x axis as default.
I saw already on MorphOS that the arrows for spin edit are rather big if they are one over the other. The idea was to make them side by side.
The OpenStreetMap is now named Mapparium and I created a Release, until now only for MorphOS and AROS(i386). The Version for Amiga 68k needs a little bit more optimization, and for AmigaOS4 it needs a request ;-).
Implemented GPX reading and writing, really very easy. Tested with some of my cycle routes (I cuted the start away for the screenshot). It also saves the waypoints and tracks into a default.gpx to load at next start, its the easiest way to start. At the moment I draw a little rectangle at every track point and connect them with a line. Sadly it seems to be not possible to draw a thick line with the standard methods, the PenWidth and PenHeight in RastPort are ignored. so I guess this point approach works best for recorded tracks. For planed routes with little points its hard to see. Maybe I write an own line drawing routine, with Bresenham it should be possible to make.
OpenStreetMap with Waypoints and Tracks
Besides I increased the speed dramatically on drawing, on Amiga 68k its much faster now, even usable and resizing on MorphOS with less problems and much faster, it does not recalculate the complete image on every resize step, but only draws the image.
More work on the OpenStreetMap viewer for Amiga systems. If a Tile is needed it will be set to a Queue and an extra thread checks the Queue tries to load the file from the hard disk, if it does not exist there it loads it from internet. The image shows a special replacement image as long the image is loaded. Of course if you browse around soon the number of tiles become huge. At a time you need to clean the tiles from memory. I introduced a maximum tile number to hold in memory (currently 1000). At every tile the time of last use is noted. The list is sorted and the oldest are removed (oldest means longest time not used).
It works already very nice, I added a little statistic window to see, when tiles are loaded from HD or from Net. Later I will introduce a prefs window to configure the number of tiles to keep in memory especially for Amiga 68k would be important to reduce the value. 1000 tiles needs around 150 MiB. Also the cache on hard disk could be inspected and deleted then. I checked my cache folder, which stores the tile files since I started this work, there are 8400 files inside with a complete size of 150 MB, so its not so urgent to clean it. OpenStreetMap suggests to keep the cache images for at least 7 days or check the status online. I do not plan to edit, so for me it’s not so important to have the very last map updates.
The next step to become more useful I added a search function, already work very nicely, only had some problems with german umlauts (äüö) and other standard characters (é,è,Î and so on). The Input from the Edit needs to be converted to UTF8 using AnsiToUTF8(). Maybe I should do that already indide the LCL code (like I make UTF8ToAnsi when drawing text to screen, thats the reason the copyright sign work).
AmOSM with Search function
The further work will include waypoints and tracks/routes with import and export of GPX data, usual format of GPS devices (mine also) and maybe KMZ the Google Earth format. In principle it would be nice to also read GPS data from a real GPS device, which is connected via serial cable with computer. I’m wondering how to use serial connection in AROS, if even possible, maybe even with an USB to serial adapter, most computers does not have serial connectors anymore.
