[Marble-devel] Routing in marble

[Arnd Baecker]

Hi Dennis,

thanks a lot for the quick fixes!!

On Wed, 14 Apr 2010, Dennis Nienhüser wrote:

[...]

>> b) Both start and destination should be visible from the beginning,
>>     including the button to select the points via the mouse.
>>     (Then the "Add destination" could be removed).
>> 
>> c) The button to remove a point might be better positioned next to the
>>     label: the reason is that usually (at least on small screens) only
>>     a part of left side bar is visible, so that the
>>     button to remove a point can only be reached after scrolling.
>>
>> 
> We had the idea of merging routing and searching to one widget. It's not 
> fully finished and we need to discuss it a bit more. The small screen 
> modifications need some discussion as well (ideally the sidebar would not be 
> needed on small screen devices).

Maybe for this one could use the right-mouse button
with additional entries: "Start (Routing)"/"Destination (Routing)"
and "Remove point (Routing)" (if applicable).
Even an "Add point (Routing)" might make sense:
its position in the list of points could be determined by the
two nearest points.

The information about the length of the route and the estimated
time could be given as a small overlay window.

Anyhow, just some thoughts - this is not an important point
for me ... ;-)

>> d) I would prefer that no centering takes after the route
>>     computation/update (In particular if one makes fine adjustments
>>     in some part of the route one has to zoom in again).
>>
>> 
> Good point, although the initial adjustments make sense imho. I changed it 
> in trunk to only update the viewport if you click on the Get Directions 
> button, while changes to the route directly in the map do not trigger 
> zoom/center changes anymore. I think that mostly matches what one expects, 
> please give it a try.

Yes, this feels right to me ;-)!

>> f) A button to save the result as gpx file would be fantastic!
>
> Yes, on my TODO list :-)

Great - by this one could really make use of the
results (eg. by transferring them onto the GPS device etc.).
At the moment it is already a great tool for planning;
I find the interface much nicer to use than openrouteservice.org,
so saving the route would allow me to fully replace it .. ;-)

Of course, there would be many interesting additions for
the future, like adding height profiles from SRTM data
(to estimate cycling and hiking routes in terms of ascent/descent ...).
((BTW: for steep hills, this will also change the
length of a route .. ;-))

And then having the possibility for off-line routing
would be very interesting as marble already works perfectly fine
in this case.
This would, of course, require to have the vector data
locally available.
Maybe one could re-use stuff from navit (http://www.navit-project.org/)
for such a provider ...

Thanks a lot for your work, best,

Arnd