On Oct 4, 2007, at 2:50 PM, Stephen - K1LNX wrote:
Maps, maps and more maps.
Ye gods, xastir already supports hundreds of formats. If there's an area of xastir lacking, that ain't it. (:
We need the ability to use Google maps
Licensing issues could problematic, but I think someone is already keeping an eye on that.
I suspect something more like our own internet map server (or set of servers) could be useful, so that the free map data that's available could be stored in such a way it could be displayed nicely and consistently. An added bonus to this method would be that those of us who operate mobile/internet-less could duplicate the mapserver with our personal dataset.
True cross-platform compatibility. Should it be developed in Python or Java?
I'd say neither, as scripting/interpreted languages (Python) don't always scale well (there's a _lot_ of code in xastir). Python doesn't appeal to me for another reason: minor version differences are incompatible with each other (ImageMagick, anyone?). I've got a reasonably complex unix enterprise configuration, and python is a serious pain. Java seems to be a pig, performance-wise.
I'd like to see xastir remain fairly lightweight for mobile/portable applications.
Something like Qt (licensing issues again!) would be more desirable, IMO. wxWidgets claims to be a similar open source cross-platform development toolkit, but I know nothing about it (other than the only time I tried to install on Solaris it wouldn't build without a fight).
Having said all that, I'll say this: it should be left up to the developers, as they'll be writing the code. As long as the code meets user specs it doesn't matter what the implementation details are.
Some of the modularization ideas we've seen kicked around on this list leads me to think maybe that after the inital release of v2, the UI module could fork, with different versions for windows, X11, and (my personal favorite) Mac OS.
I don't agree with us (the users) setting deadlines. Again, the developers are doing the work, for free, on their own precious time. I'm pretty grateful for what we get out of 'em, especially under those conditions. (:
-Jason kg4wsv _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir
