[Kstars-devel] post 3.4 TODO list

[Jason Harris]

Hello,

I think we are in pretty good shape for 3.4 (in terms of bugs to be 
fixed), since not much has changed since 3.3.  I will still do my usual 
"QA List", sometime after the freeze.

I did notice that we have a lot of stuff marked "TODO" on the 3.4 
Features Guide:
http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde-3.4-features.html
I think almost all of that should be retagged for 4.0.  Let me know if 
there's smething there that you want to stay tagged for 3.4.

Here's some things I am thinking of working on after the 3.4 thaw (some 
of these are user wishes):

Observing List improvements:
+ visible marking of objects in the sky map
+ draw a rectangle on the sky, add objects in that region to the list 
(with ability to filter by type and magnitude)
+ make window non-modal
+ Ability to Save/Load observing lists (maybe provide some default 
lists, like the 50 nearest stars, or the Messier Catalog)
+ Add other ways to populate observing lists?  Any ideas?

Side Panel: Similar to the side panel in Konqueror or KDevelop.  
The pages would be streamlined, compact versions of some of our tools 
(you'd go to the full tool for full functionality).  Possible panel 
pages:
+ Find Object
+ Observing List
+ Object Details
+ Calculator
+ What's Up Tonight
+ Telescope Control Panel
+ Quick Settings
(actually, I need to think about this some more...we probably do not 
want to have to maintain two versions of all of these tools!  Some of 
them, like the Find Object window, would be perfect to just drop into a 
side panel and remove the standalone window altogether.  However, a lot 
of these are too big to put as-is in a side panel...)

Favorites:  Several users have asked to be able to quickly activate a 
preset configuration, such as "Looking west at 6:00 pm from Paris, 
France, using the Moonless Night colorscheme".  This kind of stuff can 
be stored easily in DCOP scripts, but there's no way to do a quick-load 
of a script.  I was thinking of binding the Function keys (F2-F12) to 
load DCOP scripts specified by the user.  Maybe we can preload some 
useful ones by default.

More Infoboxes:
+ Add an Infobox showing the coordinates of a connected telescope, and 
what it is tracking.
+ Add an Infobox mode for the Observing List (showing just object 
names)?

OpenGL: The Legend Continues!  Apparently, with Qt4 we will have some 
native OpenGL support.  So I will hopefully be taking another look at 
this.

Program efficiency: The code as written must check every object in the 
catalog to see if it is onscreen, every time it refreshes the screen.  
When the zoomlevel is high, this is inefficient, because nearly 100% of 
the objects are offscreen (plus, refreshes happen more often at high 
zoom).  I really need a way to totally ignore objects which are 
offscreen by a wide margin.  I haven't yet come up with a clever 
method, but I have not yet actually sat down and thought long and hard 
about it.  Ideas are welcome.

Custom Objects:  Needs to be easier to add your own objects and catalogs 
(I believe Pablo said he wanted to look at this at one point...)

There's more, but this is what's been on my mind lately.  Anyone else 
have plans to share?

Jason
-- 
jharris at 30doradus.org