[Xastir] Two suggestions

[Curt, WE7U]

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Luc Dore VA2KSH wrote:

> I downloaded from geobase (the Canadian geomatic website) the national
> road system, nameplaces for much of the areas I hang out in, all in
> shp; so with shapelib built in, all I have to do is 'reindex maps' and
> it works !  Very cool.  I did set the nameplace shp's to max zoom of
> 128 so they don't clutter the screen when zoomed out.

You can also compile in dbfawk support, create a dbfawk file for
those types of maps, then really customize how they are displayed.
If you do this, donate the dbfawk file back to us so that other
people can use it, or put it up for download and add it to this web
site yourself:

    http://www.findewe.com/nwaprs/XastirMaps

In fact, add the site you're talking about above to that page.  I'm
not sure anyone else knows about roadmaps for Canada.


> So without more ado, here is suggestion 1: when right-clicking on the
> map, the zoom level sub-menu has some good choices; zoom out gives a
> view 2x the last level and zoom in cuts the level in half.  What about
> a new entry in that menu where the user can enter a specific zoom level
> (e.g. I want to enter a zoom level somewhere between 1024 and 8192).  I
> just want to cut the number of map iterations to get to a zoom level I
> want to have.

Good suggestion and timely.  We just added this recently:  "Center &
Zoom".  Upgrade to the CVS version of Xastir and you'll have it.  Or
wait for the next development release (a few days from now).  I'm
not sure whether it was in the last snapshot.


> Suggestion 2: this one is more specific to the tigermaps.  I've set the
> timeout in the 'configure tigermap' menu to about 30 seconds; however
> I've seen xastir simply block there without any functionality for more
> than 2 minutes waiting on tigermaps (which makes me wonder about that
> time out slider).  What about a "cancel current map download" button.

This timeout is because we are waiting for either libcurl or wget to
finish their work.  We pass the timeout value to wget (not sure
about libcurl), but wget may ignore it or override it in some cases.
We have to wait for those calls to return before we can continue our
work.  If they don't return quickly enough, we're stuck waiting on
them anyway.

To code around this could involve a lot of work, spawning a separate
process just to do the wget then having that process signal the main
process when it was done.  It would also have to keep its own timer
and try to kill the wget process on timeout.  I think it would be
more trouble than it is worth.


> When zooming out of an area two or three times, where the tigermap
> isn't even displayed (e.g. northern Ontario), I'm stuck waiting on the
> tigermap to load.  The load is even application-wide as no other
> operations are accepted until the load is complete; the cursor is
> replaced with the "please wait" cursor.

Disable all maps, zoom in/out, then re-enable maps.

--
Curt, WE7U			    archer at eskimo dot com
Arlington, WA, USA		http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"