[Qlandkartegt-users] A new horizon: MapRoom

[Oliver E. <oli...@gm...>]

Hi,

probably most of you have wondered if the development of QLandkarte GT has come to an end as the 
release cycles lengthened. Well  for QLandkarte GT there will be no big development anymore. It is kind of 
pretty complete. 

And, more important, my new ideas do not fit into the internal structure of QLandkarte GT anymore. You 
can change the concepts of a software one ore two times, by simply adding a second way to do things. 
This will mess up the code and at a certain point new ideas will not fit anymore. This has happened to 
QLandkarte GT.

That is why I started from scratch. And it's not just copying code (ok I copied a lot of code, too) it's a 
complete new way to do things. Starting with a new repository host. I never was happy with Sourceforge. It 
was good because it was for free and there where not many alternative services. That's much better today. 
I choose BitBucket as service and Mercurial as repository. A big relief. 

https://bitbucket.org/maproom/maproom/wiki/Home

Right now MapRoom is not really usable for a normal user. The only thing it does is rendering maps. But 
that is, compared to QLandkarte, a big step into another direction. With MapRoom you can display several 
maps of different projection and scale in one workspace. And speaking of workspace: you can have several 
ones. I took the experience from users failing to cope with QLandkarte's way of handling maps and 
simplified everything as much as possible. If you are interested have a look into the documentation:

https://bitbucket.org/maproom/maproom/wiki/DocMain

The difference is not only in what you see on your desktop. I also started with a new concept to structure 
the code. There are several sub-folders in the source path now. The sub-folders contain functional units. 
Thus knowing the functional unit you want to work on you automatically see just a subset of files important 
to that unit. That is much better than the current huge, flat source tree of QLandkarte GT. 

I also decided to use my own icons. I am not much of an artist, thus icons look all bad now. But at least that 
appearance is unified. And as every icon is automatically generated from a SVG file it should be fairly easy 
for a real artist to get involved.

With that we are arriving at the "get involved" section. I think this is a very good moment to actively join the 
project. Open positions are:

* Icon artist
* Documentation writer (documenting new features, fixing my bad English)
* Translators (still have to add localization)
* Developers 

Especially for developers I am adding "tasks" to the issue tracker 

https://bitbucket.org/maproom/maproom/issues?status=new&status=open

It would be a huge help if someone takes care of these tasks. I took care that there is no need to 
understand the complete code. That makes it easy to start. And you do not have to fight with half baked 
concepts on the first run. You can start right from the beginning with new code. If you are interested give 
me a short notice and I will give you a detailed briefing.

I hope I could attract you curiosity. Right now you have to compile the code on your own. Nevertheless I 
would be happy if you use it and give feedback. 

Have fun!

Oliver