One more year of fun and intense productivity in Randa came to an end just a few days back, and I feel so good to have been a part of it. Much progress was made by the Marble team this year by Dennis, Torsten, Friedrich, David and me. I mostly worked on the Marble Maps Android app’s navigation feature, and would like to mention the changes here very briefly:
- First of all, cmake was picking up the wrong target for aprs plugin, so I made cmake to skip the aprs plugin for Android, so that it does not lead to an unnecessary crash during building it.
- There was a bug in the Route Simulation position provider plugin, it was not working in the Navigation mode. Made a fix to that.
- Replaced the older QImage based current-position pointer, with a QML based one in the Android app. So now we are able to make our custom animations on it.
- The current-position pointer will be staying at points on the route itself, when the user is very close to the route (not too deviated from it). With the new QML based pointer, we made sure that the radius of accuracy remains the same with respect to the Earth irrespective of which height we are viewing the map from. Plus, we have got rid of this accuracy-indicator when the position-pointer is already on the route, and are showing it only otherwise.
- There was a minor bug with this in the desktop version as well. Imagine that while you’re simulating a navigation through a route between New York and Boston, you zoom out till the whole Earth is visible, then rotate the Earth so that the other half of the globe, for example India, is visible now, instead of America. In that case the position marker was showing up on the top-left corner of map (somewhere in the sky), when it was supposed to not be visible at all since it is theoretically present on the other “not-visible” side of the globe now. So this bug was fixed as well.
- Used some new maneuver direction pixmaps for navigation in the Android app, getting rid of old ones, and also made them look sharper in the Navigation info-bar while they were shown during turn-by-turn navigation, by making some tweaks in the QMLs that were using them.
- Finally, the distance text that shows on the top while in Navigation mode, its border height has been changed to match the height of that of the maneuver pixmaps shown on its left as well, so that the view looks much more uniform. Plus, a similar panel has been added at the bottom as well, that shows the speed and distance information during the navigation, each at two different sides of the panel.
That’s all about work. And adding to the yummy food that turns out to be truly delicious every single year, this time we had some more fun activities as well. We were fortunate enough to board a cable-car to ride to as high as possible in the mountains, so much that we ended up finding ourselves in snowfall ( it’s my first time being in a snowfall 🙂 ), which was amazing! The special red tea we were greeted at a stop at a restaurant during the hike was pretty unique. We then visited a museum, and that was a lot of fun as well.
Such a lively and eventful week it was, thanks a lot to Mario and Simon for organizing the Randa Meetings one more year. Let’s keep the Marble rolling, and I hope to be a part of this again in the subsequent years to come! 🙂
sanjibandotme 