N810 discount code works!

Yay, the N810 is finally available in the Nokia online store and the discount code works (for Finland at least)

This and that...

Been too busy with work (and school) to do anything really interesting for Mapper the last couple of weeks. I'm rewriting how Mapper handles paths (tracks and routes) to be a bit more generic. And for routes be more suitable for handling routing internally. Also gypsy seems interesting, need to add support for that.

Oh, and I finally gave in and joined facebook, should be easy to find me.

g_convert (iconv wrapper) transliteration

I was playing with the g_convert iconv wrapper to get rid of all öäå and other special characters so searching for, lets say: "Hämeenkatu" would work with just "Hameenkatu" in Mapper. All I got was a bunch of ?????? instead.
Anyway, this blog post explains it.. annoying.

Some Mapper progress...

Mapper has now a pretty nice feature list:
* Can uses OSM data for Places, Streets and POIs
o Importer converts planet XML file to sqlite database with selected features
o Reads bzip2 compressed 0.5 API planet XML files
* POIs and Streets can be searched
* Displays street and place where you are
* Setting arbitrary destination point
* Setting destination to POI or Street
* Display rough estimate of distance to destination
* Periodic distance to destination announcement
* Show a bearing to destination in heading compass
* Show a bearing to next way point in heading compass
* Quick POI Add interface (Hard coded list for now)
* Click POI for information
* Displays GPS sky and signal information
* Route way point list with directions
* Simple Track point filter (by HDOP, VDOP and angle)
* Speech output for route way points and destination information
o Uses espeak+gstreamer
* Supports both normal Desktops (plain Gtk+) and Internet Tablets (770, N800, N810) (Hildon)

Unfortunately, I haven't had enough free time to work on routing just yet, but it will come soon I hope.

Next Mapper version

Work is getting in the way for all the fun stuff, but some nice Mapper features are planned for the next (1.0.4?) version:
- Search POIs
- Search streets
- Route waypoint display/list
- Handling of connections with libconic

Nokia N810 Internet Tablet

So Nokia released a new version of the Internet Table, the N810.

But they made some strange design decisions once again.
- Keyboard must be open to use keypad
- Compared to the N800 they removed a memory slot
- Memory type changed again (RS-MMC -> SD -> mini/microSD)
- And the best of all, API and ABI break *again*
- No protection cover for the screen, like on the 770
- microSB connector, one more bloody cable to carry around and forget

Don't get me wrong, I like it. It looks very nice, much nicer than the toyish N800, but still not as good as the original IT, the 770.

Positive features:
- Slide keyboard
- Integrated GPS
- A bit more Mhz
- 2 Gig of internal flash
- Updated Gtk (even if 2.10 is already old)

The integrated GPS and keyboard should make it a very nice platform for doing OpenStreetMap work.

The next thing is to get Mapper running on Chinook and add some OSM editing features.

Mapper

I finaly got my maemo-mapper fork in such a shape that it should be usable. Check it out here.