Hi Chris, I agree with you, with some consideration to be taken. I explain my personal point of view below. Please notice that it's just my personal POV not the project's one.
> -----Mensaje original----- > De: [email protected] [mailto:gvsig_internacional- > [email protected]] En nombre de Chris Puttick > Enviado el: jueves, 29 de abril de 2010 10:15 > Para: [email protected] > Asunto: [Gvsig_english] gvSIG mobile question > > A silly one, some might say, but why is the focus of gvSIG mobile on an officially > dead operating system? The next version has been announced as being officially not > backward compatible Well, gvSIG Mobile was started on 2007. That year there were no news about Android, iPhone, and so on. We tried to find Linux based mobile platforms, but there were no commercial available platform, apart from some experiments or retired ideas (Sharp Zaurus,...). OpenMoko was something to explore in the beginning, as you know. Compatibility issues are real but for .NET code on Microsoft platform. .NET Compact Framework is not compatible with the new Windows Phone 7 platform. It really doesn't affect gvSIG Mobile code, as it's Java code. The problem will be to have available Java Virtual Machines (CDC) for the new platform. > and the platform with the widest support, fastest growth and > greatest number of handsets is Android. I completely agree with you about his point. Market trends are proving this fact [1]. As a matter of fact, new devices are appearing, even ruggerized ones. > Any chance focus will shift to Android anytime soon? >From the project official roadmap, we are working towards the stable version gvSIG Mobile 1.0, which should be finished within 2/3 months, more or less. It will run on Windows Mobile 6.X Apart from the official roadmap, at Prodevelop we have made some developments. - During the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009, we granted a scholarship to an MsC student to make a try to port gvSIG Mobile to Android. Some results were achieved, but the way seemed to us not to be the right one. - During 2009, we made an internal development for mobile phones (Java CLDC and Android), starting as a simple map viewer (tile services, OSM services access, ...) and we released it as gvSIG Mini Project [2]. We liked the results, so we are pushing its development. During the next days we are going to publish a new release of gvSIG Mini for Android with a lot of new features (WMS, WMTS support, share with social networks, configurable tile layers, navigation mode, compass support, etc.), *but* it still lacks vector support (apart from POIs or routes rendering). We would like to add vector capabilities on gvSIG Mini for Android. We have plans for starting working on it, but it's an internal investment, so we cannot provide a large development team. I'm in contact with QGIS developers, to see if they could be interested in working together. I'd like to offer now, this chance to any developer interested on Android and mapping willing to contribute. If you provide testing it will be wellcome. Regarding documentation, it's ok. If you are thinking about L10N, we are building everything in English, with very few translation into Spanish, so L10N into English is not needed (thanks anyway). Other type of documentation (user manual, ...) is also being done, but maybe you could contribute reviewing it, or writing other documents (how-tos, tutorials, ...). It would be great if you could allocate some developer resources, even part-time. Any other people interested in joining us? > > We could definitely provide testing and documentation support and potentially loan > Android hardware, possibly provide other support too. > > Regards > > Chris Thanks for your interest [1] http://bit.ly/3ufmm [2] http://www.gvsigmini.org/ --------------------------------------------- Miguel Montesinos CTO PRODEVELOP, S.L. mmontesinos [at] prodevelop [dot] es www.prodevelop.es _______________________________________________ Gvsig_internacional mailing list [email protected] http://listserv.gva.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gvsig_internacional
