Map viewer

[SKLoki]

it would be nice if on a iriver, we could have some maps like google maps.

[Chronon]

Obviously there's no internet connection available, so you can't call up arbitrary maps on demand.  I'm not sure how you expect this to work other than deciding beforehand which map you want and saving an image of it to your player.

[SKLoki]

Perhaps, we could have roadmaps, dont need internet connection.

[gevaerts]

Maps have this really interesting issue of where to get them

[PaulJam]

Maps have this really interesting issue of where to get them

Maybe the map material from OpenStreetMap could be used for that.
(There is already a feature request for that on Flyspray: http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/9071 )

[Chronon]

Thanks for pointing that out, PaulJam.  OpenStreetMap looks like a nice resource.

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* I changed the topic title to reflect that this is not for iriver players only.

[SKLoki]

It would be great to consult roadmaps on a iriver. Do you see the project realizable ?

[Yotto]

I have saved pictures of areas on my ipod when driving in strange places. That, along with my cheap GPS that doesn't have many roads, and I was all set.

I had to remember which picture to load, and had to pan and zoom them, but it wasn't horrible. Still, a dedicated application to handle that would be welcome.

Of course, it needs someone to write it and until someone wants it bad enough to write it comes along, well, it's not going to happen.

[gbl08ma]

First of all, I'm new on Rockbox Forums but I already use Rockbox since some months ago on my iPod Nano v2, and I'm just impressed: I didn't use my iPod because I didn't like the Apple firmware and much less iTunes, and Rockbox helped me free up my player (and my computer, the iTunes software is a complete resource eater).

Today I imagined it would be great to have a way to browse maps on the iPod. Obviously, without an internet connection, it's impossible to browse with up-to-date images (as various people already said on this thread). But, as roads don't often change, downloading maps for a specific location and having the ability to browse (including searching) them on Rockbox would be pretty good.

About downloading maps, some time ago I came across this: http://code.google.com/p/gmapcatcher/ . It downloads maps when you're online and allows you to browse them when you're offline. I did a bit of investigation, the images the program downloads are simple PNG images organized in folders depending on their coordinates and zoom level. The map with zoom from 0 to 6 of a medium sized city take less than 6MB.

Obviously it's impossible to port it to Rockbox as-is, but being an opensource application it's possible to take ideas out of that app and implement them on Rockbox. I was thinking of downloading the maps through that app, and then put them on a folder in the rockbox player (like it happens with doom and dict plugins).

Please give me some feedback over this idea, if it would be possible by any means and if no, why. I have programming experience but not in C (I program in VB.NET, C# and other managed languages), however if you think such map plugin would be possible in Lua, I have no problem in learning Lua and getting my hands dirty on this task :)´

EDIT: I would prefer if this was done as a real RB plugin in C as the performance is much better...

[Chronon]

Yes, it seems doable.  I think the main thing is to provide a sensible interface for browsing viewable maps (there is already a PNG viewer) and selecting the one you want.

[gbl08ma]

On my concept of map plugin, the user would put map files (and folders) on a specific folder of the DAP filesystem.
Then there could be a specific map index format for the plugin, but I think that parsing the locations file generated by GMapCatcher would be enough for now. If a specific map format is created someday, the plugin could act as a viewer and be able to "play" map indexes (and even route A-B instructions).

The navigation on the maps on iPods would be made with the four directional keys (to move left, right, up and down), and the scrollwheel to zoom, like on PNG viewer.

The biggest challenge on this plugin is putting the images together in the correct order with the correct zoom, be able to go to X,Y coordinates, and having a usable speed (PNG viewer is somewhat slow at decoding files). And in the future, it would also be nice if we could search for certain locations (villages, roads, streets).

Well, it seems I'm gonna checkout the SVN of Rockbox to see what I can do... wish me good luck and good work. Obviously if someone wants to join the work, they are greatly welcome

[Chronon]

It would be a good idea, once you have posted a patch, to post a link here so that others can easily see what you have done and contribute if they want to.

[gbl08ma]

Right now I got a whole bunch of ideas and no code yet

I'm setting up the development evironment, firstly I tried using Cygwin, but things were way too slow and gave lots of errors so now I just downloaded the VMWare disk image with the Rockbox development environment already setup... the problem is that I don't like using VMWare, so I'm going to use VirtualBox. But... the VirtualBox version I had installed is too outdated and has a problem reading the VMDK file...

Conclusion: I'm waiting for VirtualBox download to finish in order to read correctly (hopefully) the disk image, and when that finishes I'll need to set up the virtual machine (X settings, timezone, etc.). So, most likely I won't be able to code anything today, but to save time I'm already investigating how the map images are stored and organized. Fortunately everything seems to be done with numeric folders and files which makes pretty easy reading them on a DAP and showing them accordingly.