[Xastir] Some observations with the recent CVS release

[Curt, WE7U]

On Tue, 5 Sep 2006, William McKeehan wrote:

> I'd like to have toggle buttons to disable pop-ups for the
> different type of pop-ups. I have one station that I would like to
> receive all pop-ups except the emergency beacon one (I have one
> local station that runs frequently with a status text of "OFFICIAL
> EMERGENCY STATION").

A good solution to that would be to ask him/her very nicely to
change the text to "Official Emergency Station".  You could explain
how all caps is considered to be shouting, plus the fact that this
triggers emergency code in more than one APRS application (Xastir +
APRSWorld so far that I know of, perhaps more).


> I have another that I run full-time on another machine (disabled
> transmit, but listening) that I would like to turn off all
> pop-ups.

So... It sounds like a command-line flag which disables popups
globally would work in that 2nd situation.  Correct?


> I don't use the track feature very often (althought I would like
> to see it work more like APRS+SA where you can track multiple
> stations), so I don't have an opinion on the tracking staying from
> one session to another.

I used to use APRS+SA a bit.  I know how that tracking works.  If
others feel the same way about it we could certainly change the way
Xastir works so that it compares to a list of tracked stations
instead of just one.  I can imagine both simple and difficult ways
to do this in the UI:

It'd be really slick to have a dialog similar to the Interface
Control dialog, where you can add stations to the list, and perhaps
add an enable/disable button to one side of each callsign, keeping
the global tracking enable/disable as well.  That would take quite a
bit of code to implement though.

The simple way would be to have another toggle which would cause
Xastir to look up the matching callsigns in a file.  Text-edit the
file using whatever means you have at-hand.  Have Xastir check the
timestamp on the file periodically and if newer, re-read the file.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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