First, a quick update to MapBuddy:

• Translations (French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Polish, Slovak)
• A “Add to addressbook” button on merchant’s window (with the help of Jonathon Jongsma)
• A precision circle is drawn around your position
• Kinetic scrolling is turned on

Then, a bigger update for libchamplain 0.4.4:

• API clean up (with API backward compatibility): champlain_view_set_size should have never existed
• Fix to make Python bindings work out of the tarballs!
• Use shared paths by all tiles consumers on Maemo devices to store tiles (saves bandwidth)
• Load tiles in a spiral manner from the centre (thanks to Jason Woofenden)
• Optimizations resulting in
  • Faster start-up
  • Smoother scrolling
  • Energy savings (by doing less computations)

Then, a huge update for libchamplain 0.5:

• First development release with new APIs:
  • Local map rendering (Google Summer of Code of Simon Wenner)
  • New Map Source mechanism à la Pipe and Filter (Jiří Techet)

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If you know how to edit maps, maybe you can land a hand! CrisisCommon also has other resources.

Follow-up: Mikel Maron has before and after images along with more info.

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To solve this, I created Map Buddy: a map application specifically designed for Maemo 5.  It is quite simple to use and works out of the box (no configuration or selection of plug-ins required!).  It also has something other apps don’t: it uses web-services to provide business search capabilities.

Here’s the use case I built Map Buddy upon: you just arrived in Montréal and want to find a sushi restaurant.

1. You start Map Buddy, it will be centred on the place you closed Map Buddy on.  You can click on the “Center on me” icon on the bottom left, and it will centre the map on Montréal ‒ remember you are in Montréal for this example! By the way, your position is marked by a blue dot. Later version will display the precision too.
2. To search for businesses, you have to switch in business search mode, tap on the magnifying glass to do so.
3. Enter sushi in the search bar and press enter! The map will be populated with markers representing the places tagged with sushi (powered by Praized Media, a Montréal start-up).
4. To get the name of the place, tap once on the marker.
5. To get the complete details about a place, tap once on the name: a new window will be opened with the business’ address, phone number and web site if available.  Map Buddy even provides a call button!
6. To clear the search results, tap on the trash can in the search bar or do a new search.

It’s that simple!

Map Buddy includes a place search so that if you are looking for Pizza in New York, you don’t have to scroll from San Francisco to New York to get there.  Select the Place search mode, enter New York in the search field and press enter.  A picker dialog will be opened to let you select the correct New York.

To switch to other maps, click on the layer icon, it will bring up the list of possible maps to display.

I hope you like it!  Try it today! WARNING: Installing Map Buddy in this early stage requires adding the extras-devel repository which might install unstable software on your device.  Try it at your own risk or if you are a professional

NB: Praized Media only has strong data sets for Canada and United States.  They plan to sign business partnerships to get data for Europe in 2010.  In the mean time, you can directly add businesses using this form.

NB: Help is appreciated to translate it!

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Yes! Libchamplain now has a scale! It was long overdue. In fact, I first started to work on it way before libchamplain 0.2.2 was even released (1.25 year ago). It got impeded by more important features and bug fixes. Two or three months ago Tollef Fog Heen took over the branch and added the magic required maths to compute the scale. I then took over his work (as he was quite busy and I wanted this too) to provide the final result.

Since all the changes are backward compatible, I’ll soon release a libchamplain 0.4.3 with the scale disabled by default (to ensure the same visual behaviour as before upgrade). To display a scale, an application just has to change the show-scale property to TRUE.

#if CHAMPLAIN_CHECK_VERSION (0, 4, 3)
g_object_set (champlain_view, "show-scale", TRUE, NULL);
#endif


The scale also supports other exotic units than the SI/metric ones. It can display miles and feet, if you’re into that. By the way, the scale will automatically switch from kilometres to metres when it makes more sense. That was quite more complex to do with miles and feet as they are not simply a power of 10. Set the scale-unit property to CHAMPLAIN_UNIT_MILES to get miles.

You can limit the width (in pixels) of the scale with the max-scale-width property.  If you watch closely, the scale will adjust itself right away when you move the map.

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It currently has 1 plug-in.  This plugin is one that will be useful to Montréalers: it displays the status of the Bixi network.  Bixi is Montréal’s self-serve public bike system.  Apparently its design is so good — the bike system, not the plug-in — that it’ll be implemented in both London (UK) and Boston (USA) very soon.

So the plug-in is quite simple: you have a drop down list where you select to see available bikes in stations near you or available docking stations.  The map is updated instantly to display the new values.  The markers on the map change in size depending on the available bikes/docks.  The information is automatically updated every 5 minutes.

After all the legal verifications, this plug-in is now free for everyone to share.  It should serve as a good example of what you can do with Emerillon and libchamplain.  It is the first piece of code (that I am aware of) to demonstrate ChamplainMarker sub-classing to implement unique look & feel.

Disclaimer: This plug-in has been independently developed by Novopia Solutions and is not in anyway related to or endorsed by Bixi, the operator of Montréal’s public bike system.  Bixi is a trade mark of Société de vélo en libre-service.

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Mandatory Greyhound rant

With a 3 hour delay on departure (making a total of 5 hours of wait in Boston’s 10 ℃ station), we managed to arrive 5 hours late in Montréal, due to a defective heater in the bus.  Add moving everyone at 5 AM from that defective ’70s bus to a freezing ’90s bus with actually less seats than the previous one, and the fact that there was enough people to fill 3 buses in Boston, but only 54 managed to leave on the first one and you’ve got a complete picture of the fiasco.

I am not going to run in too much details but all this could have been so easily avoided.  The delays were due to the fact that the bus that was supposed to bring us had been delayed at the US border.  Fine, shit happens.  What is not fine is that they waited until our expected departure time to get a replacement driver (since he had busted his legal driving time).  See, it takes about 5 hours from the border to Boston.  Knowing he was going to be late (and therefore busting his hours), the driver should have called his manager, which should have prepared a replacement driver for the next departure in 10 hours! But none of that happened.  And, to top it all, there were no Greyhound dispatcher to be called by the Boston station employees to inform them of a missing departure bus.  Complete utter fail.

Emerillon 0.1.0 release

Now for the fun part.  With all that time on hands, I created 2 new plugins for Emerillon (Copy a link of the current view to online maps, and display map position in statusbar) and cooked a release including all the 5 submitted translations.  Woot! Grab the release here.  This is a preview release with no guaranty on plugin API stability.  See the complete announce email.

Before anyone asks, I am using the gnome-colors Shiki-Wize theme.

For those who missed the original announcement: Emerillon is a map viewer. Aiming at simple user interface, Emerillon is a powerful, extensible application. It features OpenStreetMap based
maps. Use it to browse maps, search the map for places, placemark places for later quick access and more!

There are even packages of this release for Ubuntu Hardy from Mathieu Trudel.  See his blog of the install instructions.

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Why another map application do you say? Simply because none of them is free AND targeted at the Gnome desktop AND has ease of use in its (visible) goals.  This project should be easy to use for anyone, not only for mapping geeks.

Emerillon is an application designed to be extended.  There is a number of small specialized map applications that were created in the last year, I have hope this one will be the catalyst of the development efforts.  Out of the box, Emerillon comes with 2 plugins: a search and a placemark plugin.  There are numerous plugins ideas : a GPX viewer, GPS integration, Telepathy integration (both to share the app and to display your friends location), a plugin to display the position under the mouse cursor, a plugin to display personal markers and I have two special ideas that I want to keep for myself to implement Other ideas are welcomed too!

Emerillon is a project originally started by Marco Barisione in October 2008.  Due to various reasons, it remained dormant for almost a year, until I decided to take over and push it forward.   Turns out, Marco had laid out very good UI base on which I built upon.

Visit http://www.novopia.com/emerillon/ for more screenshots and details.

Kudos to be given

Emerillon is built of code inspired by other projects and very cool libraries.  Early on, Marco borrowed Evince’s sidebar.  This sidebar is so nice and clean that it should be part of Gtk+! The problem is that this code is GPL but Gtk+ is not.

Another quite common widget in Gnome apps is Epiphany’s spinning throbber.  Again, it is GPL’d and the code has to be copied from apps to apps.

I am not going to kudo libchamplain Lets say I have found API omissions that will need to be addressed for Emerillon to work perfectly. Who needs a “selected” signal after all? Still, libchamplain was quite necessary to build this app.

Emerillon’s plugin system was faster to implement than I expected when I got this idea.  But thanks to Ethos, it was a simpler task.  Ethos is a complete (Gedit/EOG alike) plugin architecture in a library.  It even provides UI widgets to manage the plugins.

Emerillon’s search plugin uses librest to fetch its data from geonames.org.  Rob Bradford was right: it is now fun again to parse XML.  I mean really.  This library makes fetching web service data an easy task.

Fetch Emerillon from Gnome’s git today and give it a try!

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While this is a field where there are plenty of FOSS solutions, the primary focus in the upcoming weeks will be on improving the geolocation solutions in GNOME.  Commercial support for libchamplain is of course on the list.

More to be announced later.

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About a month after its 1 year birthday, libchamplain hit the 0.4 mark - the first stable release of this new version.  It’s a Clutter based ClutterActor and Gtk+ widget to display street maps, cycle maps or other maps.  It comes with eye candy.

Special thanks to all contributors to this release (in chronological order of first contribution):
Pierre-Luc Beaudoin, Jonathon Jongsma, Lorenzo Masini, Packz Enoch, Thomas Van Machelen, Anders M-Pedersen, Stephane Delcroix, Denk Padje, Mike Sheldon, Emmanuel Rodriguez, Emmanuele Bassi, Lionel Dricot, Simon Wenner, Kritarth Upadhyay, Debarshi Ray, Paulo Cabido, Sjoerd Simons, Victor Godoy Poluceno, Javier Jardón, Patryk Zawadzki, Sebastian Reichel, Tim Horton, Frederic Peters, Cosimo Cecchi, Vincent Untz, Felix Riemann

Libchamplain in action in Eye of Gnome,
displaying a picture of Lübeck, Germany.

New in this release (since 0.2.10)

• Support for custom map sources: embedding apps can define their own map sources and provide tiles for libchamplain to display.  This includes a way to list available map sources.
• Zoom on double click is now configurable.
• View keeps centred when you resized the view.
• A way to convert screen coordinates to map coordinates: lets you interact with the map and its markers.
• Cache tiles: downloaded tiles are cached.  The cache is intelligently validated against the server every 7 days for now.
• Revamped marker API: Default markers now have a nicer look with rounded corners, nicer colors and a shadow.  The API allows easy image and label markers to be created.
• Limit visible zoom levels: you can now limit what the user can view.
• Feedback during loading: ChamplainView will emit a state change when loading resources from network providing better feedback possibilities to the user.
• Line and polygon drawing API: You can now easily draw lines and polygon over the map.  This is useful for indicating routes or highlighting areas.
• User Agent: libchamplain now identifies itself in HTTP requests
• Marker selection support: libchamplain provides a helpful API when you want to let user select a bunch of markers (or only one).  This API has been designed with Gtk+’s selection API in mind.
• Ported to Clutter 1.0: libchamplain now depends and use Clutter 1.0.  It allowed us to add the very nice in and out for markers.
• Bindings: the API is now bindable.  Only the Python bindings works for now but that’s not because the Perl binder didn’t try hard to get some too, try having a baby close to a release! :)  C# bindings and C++ have been worked on but didn’t make it on time for the release.
• Many bug fixes.

Plans for the future

Now that 0.4 is behind us, we already have a huge list of nice to have in 0.6 (due in same time as Gnome 2.30 or Gnome 3.0):

• Smooth zooming and animation;
• Rotation of the map;
• Display cached tiles while downloading new ones;
• Add a clustering layer: a layer where markers very close on a map will be merged into one marker;
• An MVC API for layers: use ClutterModel and support GtkTreeModel as sources of Marker data;
• Limit the visible area on the map;
• Have the map wrap horizontally;
• Have a nice dragging mode for markers;
• Add a map scale;
• Provide better accessibility;
• Better cache policies;
• Better animations;

And most importantly: local rendering of maps. This project is well on its way with the recent conclusion of the Google Summer of Code 2009.  Simon Wenner, which you probably read the progress on planet.gnome.org, did a marvellous job on this.  His work should be included in the first development release of libchamplain 0.5.

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Taking opportunity of the new introduced animations in Clutter, I added new marker animations in libchamplain:

If you are viewing through a planet, or a non HTML5 capable browser, here’s the file.

Since porting to Clutter 1.0 was the only condition set by the Gnome release team for libchamplain’s inclusion in Gnome 2.28, we can consider it a done deal!

See the complete announcement.

In other news, libchamplain 0.3.5 was also released last Saturday. It is the last release to use Clutter 0.8, but it also has very good Perl and Python bindings. Since Clutter 1.0’s bindings are not ready yet, libchamplain 0.3.5 is the last release to have bindings until Clutter gets some!

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I started the project only last Monday night, but you can already do this with it:

• See your current address and postion according to Geoclue
• List installed providers and their provided services
• Set an address on the Manual provider
• Set the address for the current network on the Localnet provider
• List previously configured addresses in the Localnet provider

Just the last items save the user of having to use dbus-send incantations.   For the screenshot lovers, here’s your dose.

The project is still quite embryonic.  It is my first attempt at using Python for such a task and I lack knowledge (and quite frankly time) on how to create the project’s infrastructure (almost as if I am missing autotools — scary!).  If someone is willing to contribute that or point me the doc I’d appreciate!

Try it!

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The problem resides in OpenSSL’s license which requires :

3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
must display the following acknowledgement:
“This product includes cryptographic software written by
Eric Young (eay@cryptsoft.com)”
The word ‘cryptographic’ can be left out if the routines from the library
being used are not cryptographic related :-).

and (because of its dual license)

3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this
software must display the following acknowledgment:
“This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project
for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit. (http://www.openssl.org/)”

This requirement as been marked as GPL incompatible.  Therefore, any GPL application using it is in license violation. While the OpenSSL FAQ stipulates that you can use it with GPL applications, this opinion is not shared by everyone. This is a quite big unadvertised licensing problem.

Now, I am not a lawyer but I can point to some existing solutions to this problem:

1. Fix Python to not use such a poisonous (to GPL) licensed library.
2. Do not use Python’s SSL code and use other implementations such as python-gnutls.  This solution less appealing as replacement libraries often don’t completely cover python’s API.
3. Relicense your GPL application to “GNU GPL  with the OpenSSL special
   exemption.” (as wget did) and add mentions to OpenSSL in your advertising materials. This solution is sometimes hard to implement as you have to contact all past contributors.

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• Support for proxies
• Support for custom map sources
• A way to list the available map sources
• Support for 2 new built-in map sources: Cycle Map and Osmarender
• A bunch of new function to allow more control on the UI
• A nicer, more flexible Marker API
• Nicer default markers: they are now grey, have rounded corners and cast a shadow!
• Notification when the view is loading content and when it’s done
• Support for locking down available zoom levels
• A more intelligent cache that can be purged
• Bindings (in the works): Perl, Python, C# and C++

Of course being a development release, the API isn’t entirely stable yet.  For instance, the code surrounding the ChamplainMapSourceDesc introduced this weekend is subject to be reviewed in the next weeks.

Yet, this release is a big step forward introducing a lot of the desired features while leaving some for an upcoming release (such as the ability to draw lines on the map).

You can grab the tarball or clone the source code.  You can read the NEWS or read about the API.

On a side note, libchamplain as been officially proposed as an external dependency for GNOME 2.28.

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ChamplainView is the map view that displays the map.  It needs a ChamplainMapSource from which it gets the map.  There are specialised objects that inherit from ChamplainMapSource such as ChamplainNetworkMapSource and the upcoming ChamplainLocalMapSource (or what ever it will be named by the end of the SoC).

champlainNetworkMapSource* champlain_network_map_source_new_full (const gchar *name,
    const gchar *license,
    const gchar *license_uri,
    guint min_zoom,
    guint map_zoom,
    guint tile_size,
    ChamplainMapProjection projection,
    const gchar *uri_format);

As you don’t want to fill all this information each time you create a new map source, libchamplain currently provides helper constructions:

ChamplainMapSource * champlain_map_source_new_osm_mapnik (void);
ChamplainMapSource * champlain_map_source_new_osm_cyclemap (void);
ChamplainMapSource * champlain_map_source_new_osm_osmarender (void);
ChamplainMapSource * champlain_map_source_new_oam (void);
ChamplainMapSource * champlain_map_source_new_mff_relief (void);

We think it could be interesting to replace these by a Factory to which you pass an enum value to get the constructed ChamplainMapSource.  You would probably be able to add your own map source constructor (as you can implement your own map sources).  You would probably be able to get the list of available map source too.

The question is: is this overkill? the best way to do it? is there something similar in glib or gtk to get inspired from? We base most of the API decisions by looking at other Gtk+ widgets, but this particular object seems to be a different case.

We are asking for your ideas.

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This functionality means a lot of possibilities for libchamplain: better accessibility, smaller bandwidth needs, smaller cache footprint, more context data and finally themable maps.  These can be very useful if you are running on different platforms such as Maemo 5 or a desktop: bigger fonts, more contrast, tango colors!

(oh and by the way, this is the new default markers: more on them in a later post)

Unfortunately, another very interestant SoC idea didn’t make it to selected list: a glib based OSM data API.  That would have made it very useful to access the downloaded data.  But hey, that will be for later!  Thanks to all the students that submitted a project idea on libchamplain

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I’ve just tagged some bugs or enhancements with the gnome-love keyword.  If you ever wanted to contribute to libchamplain, I think these bugs should be rather simple to fix/implement.

In other news, I selected a list of bugs and features that needs to be fixed before a 0.4 release is made.   Such a release will happen before Gnome 2.28 as I plan to ask to be an external dependency (as Empathy, Eog-plugin and f-spot will have use for it).  The list of bugs is listed in on the mailling list.

Libchamplain is part of Gnome’s Google Summer of Code.  There are already some libchamplain ideas. These ideas are planned for 0.6 release, but the work need to start this summer! Students: apply!

Yes, you did read f-spot! Anders Mørk-Pedersen started a f-spot plug-in to display the geolocation information of your photos!  It even works with multiple selected photos.  Now the poor Anders is so busy with school that it is stuck in a demo state. Anyone interested to help should ping us about it!  libchamplain in f-spot was made possible by Stephane Delcroix’s hard work both to libchamplain’s bindings and clutter’s.

Along the python and managed bindings, perl bindings have been announced.  Emmanuel Rodriguez is writing them with support from the perl community. He’s also contributing unit tests in perl.  These have already proven to be quite useful!

Finally, I decided to give it a try and create a website and logo for libchamplain.  I quickly made the site by borrowing Cheese’s website hehe. The logo represents a jigsaw puzzle piece of a world map as libchamplain is a module to add to existing applications to add maps. I tried to tango-ify it as much my capabilities allow me, if you have a better touch here’s the svg.  Since I have so much use for The Gimp and Inkscape, I donated to the Libre Graphics Meetup!

That was a short résumé of what happened in libchamplain recently, excluding the 53 files changed, 3591 insertions and 1165 deletions.

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(Not an actual screenshot, edited to remove non FOSS people)

Now, it is not as if I could be friend with them - after all I know their name/face because we attended the same conferences or read Planet Gnome.  I don’t want to be that excessive Facebook-friend-adder.  I personally draw the line by asking myself “Would that person know/remember who I am?”, therefore I try to only add people that I’ve talked with in real life.

Facebook chose the word Friend to identify the persons I allow to see my information.  It is a rather strong word because some of the people in my “friend” list are just acquaintances and they mix with my best friends!  Yet, they are people I’d like to keep informed about.

Thanks Facebook for forcing me to think about what defines friendship before breakfast

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For the new readers, libchamplain is a Clutter based map displaying widget.  It intends to be a light embeddable map widget for all applications with nice eye candy.  For instance, the current API concentrates on how to draw markers and display maps rather than parsing raw GPX data.

Some days before FOSDEM, work started on libchamplain 0.3.  This version will be the development version leading to libchamplain 0.4 (kind of using the same numbering schema than Clutter).  Along with all the promised features (routes, custom map sources and being bindings friendly), this version will have a better code base.  It is already much cleaner than the 0.2 series, and yet a lot of work is left to be done.  I had written a MVC version of the code and I am slowly merging this work (from the MVC branch) back into master.  Also, one of the biggest change is that libchamplain and libchamplain-gtk are now under the same git tree.  Packagers will hate us a little now, but it should provide simpler to maintain in the future.  All bindings will also be under the same tree, in the bindings directory.

There is a new demo portraying an animated marker. See demos/animated-marker.c.

Anders Mørk-Pedersen has been around before FOSDEM working on managed bindings for libchamplain.  With Stéphane Delcroix special touch, they got them running.  They are merged, and I think, ready to be tested.  Now, I am not telling you yet what those bindings are going to be used for… 

Denk Padje offered his help working on the python bindings.  While we got somethings to generate, neither of us are python specialist.  We could use some help.  The branch is bindings-python.  Once the bindings are running, examples will be written.

Libchamplain could certainly profit from Google’s Summer of Code.  Ideas such as having map drawn locally from raw map data and supporting more map sources and map projections (at least one that doesn’t make Greenland the size of South America) will probably be added to Gnome’s pool of ideas.

Now that we have a mailing list, I think a proper web site should come next.  I would also like the project to have a neat logo.  But nothing too fancy as it is a library after all.  May be someone could come up with something like likes of Geoclue’s logo, but may be as a puzzle piece (clearly indicating that it is a library).  Also, I like the Tango colors

That’s it for Febuary.

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I have the impression that the talk was well received, it certainly boosted my interest into spending long nights infront of the screen pushing libchamplain forward much more!

All of the demonstrated code is already available.  For EOG plugin, see the EOG-plugins svn repo, a release should be available in the Gnome 2.28 timeframe.  For the Empathy Geolocation, it is available in my empathy repo, and the telepathy parts already have been released.  This feature should be merged first thing in the 2.27 development cycle, allowing a smooth testing period before 2.28.  As for Emerillion, it was the first public mention of this promizing application.  It shall be announced in a close future.

To make this presentation, I used clutter-toys/opt, a clutter based presentation tools.  The slides are defined in a xml file.  I enhanced it to support embedded maps.  So if you add the following xml code, you’ll have an interactive map of Brussels, with very usefull places marked, right into your slide! Grab the branch into my clutter-toys repo.

<map width="600" height="500" zoom-level="13" latitude="50.84" longitude="4.37">
      <marker latitude="50.842966" longitude="4.35153">Porte Noire</marker>
      <marker latitude="50.845127" longitude="4.349878">Mannequin Pis</marker>
      <marker latitude="50.848548" longitude="4.353633">Délirium Café</marker>
      <marker latitude="50.821391" longitude="4.39393">Université Libre</marker>
</map>

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This feature allows you to publish your location (including complete address, latitude and longitude) to the contacts on your contact list only.  Of course, the level of detail can be tuned and limited.  The information is published using the XMPP protocol using XEP-0080.  To make a long story short, your XMPP server will need to support PEP.  Turns out that pretty much everyone but Google Talk supports it: you will still be able to receive your contact’s location, but your location won’t be published.

All clients implementing this XEP will be able to display your location.  Empathy will display your contacts location on a map using the map widget provided by libchamplain.

This feature will allow you to stay in touch with you friends, knowing where they are, and possibly, how late they’ll be at the restaurant!

Now the technical details. Upon startup, empathy will setup Geoclue to get your current position.  Geoclue will try to figure your location using all the resources you specified (among network, cell, GPS).  Upon connection, Empathy will send that information.

When you are receiving location information from your contacts, it will be stored until you decide to access that information.  Upon displaying the map view, if the information doesn’t contain a latitude and a longitude, Empathy will use Geoclue to geocode the user’s location.  Geocoding is converting a street address to a latitude, longitude pair.

Make sure you attend the “Bringing geolocation into Gnome” talk at FOSDEM 2009.

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