Dear KDE, I contribute to KStars. John Tapsell pointed out to us that our interface would not tell us what was interesting. So someone who's new to astronomy would not learn much by looking at our current interface.
John suggested we have a box that tells users what to look at, a "What's interesting" box, that would programmatically generate a list of interesting objects that are visible from your location tonight (taking into account a bunch of parameters including your equipment, location, light pollution levels, level of experience), and give you ample information on those objects in a side-bar. For instance, to the beginner, it would tell him what planets are visible in the sky presently. It's hard to explain in words, so here's an ugly mockup: http://i.imgur.com/YkGY4.png Now, I think this is an awesome idea, but I don't know how to build an interface like that -- a foldable list of celestial objects, a lot of text under each of those, a few action items that are tailored to that object (eg: You could get KStars to point a telescope to a planet, but that would not make sense for an entire constellation), and other programmatically generated text like "visible after 3 hours" or "visible now". In addition, this window should be scrollable (not shown in the mockup). If object-specific action links are too complicated, that's not a problem. We already have those in a popup-menu in KStars, so all I need then, is one action that says "Center map on <object>". Someone told me that QML is great for this. But how would I use QML to achieve this? I plan to generate the list of objects by some magic that I haven't yet thought about, pull the text out of some database (the text description is static, of course, and this could be flat file or SQLite). To start with, let's just have one action 'Slew map to $object' Regards Akarsh >> Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to unsubscribe <<
