[Xastir] APRSPoint discussion from APRS sig

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Fri, 3 Dec 2004, William McKeehan wrote:

> 1. Fast map scrolling.
> The biggest improvement that I would like to see in Xastir is faster map
> scrolling/changing. I suspect that the reason it is currently as slow as it is
> is because of the large number of map formats supported (one of Xastir's
> greatest features). One way that I can imagine increasing the speed would be
> to convert all maps to a single format. Is this on one of the developer's idea
> list? Maybe not all map types would be able to fit into this format, but it's
> a thought worth exploring.

Yuck. I don't want 2 copies of all of my map data. But yes, the fact that 
I have 6 gigs of GeoTIFFs compressed which needs to get tiled together on 
the fly means map redraws are slow.

> 2. "smart" zooming (i.e., different level of details shown at different zoom
> levels)

For vector data with dbfawk, that already happens. How do you do it for 
raster data?

> 4. Route planning/turn-by-turn, voice navigation.
> Xastir talks, but navigation is not on it's list of things to do. I can see
> why it would never make the Xastir to-do list.

There is exactly one piece of open source routing software I know of 
(well, 2, if you count BBBike, but that's limited). It's not generic 
enough for use yet.
It's not so much hard as hard to do in bounded memory (or bounded cpu, if 
you want to remember the best route you find and brute force until you 
find a better one)


> 5. Fast flexible find feature.
> I have not played with this feature in Xastir very much, but when I have, it
> seems to be much less flexable than Delorme's; and Delorme has many more
> points of interest to display (businesses, etc).

You have a free database of businesses (or even a cheap one) I can develop 
to? Get me the data in a format I can use offline and I'll do it.