Messages

Thank you guys, really great that you could "marry" the new Elevate themes with Locus. Looking forward to trying that out.

Good point there @john_percy.
I think we should reserve the term POI for the "official" ones, and perhaps call the Locus-internal ones Personal Points.
That would lead to these definitions:

• POI (points of interest):
  Points that are defined as part of or additional to a map. Can be searched and shown/hidden with the "Points of interest (beta)" function.
• Personal points:
  The points defined globally in Data > Points. Can be shown/hidden individually.

As suggested by gynta (http://help.locusmap.eu/topic/edit-track-creation-of-waypoints), I would like to propose an addition to the manual: A definition of frequently used terms (FUT ).

This is always a problem in discussions here and on the Helpdesk. In the above topic I explicitly inserted my working definitions, to get that out of the way first. I'm pasting an edited version of this here, as starting point. I'm aware that there is no globally accepted definition of all this, so it can't be avoided to be somehow Locus-centric - and it'll probably be criticized by some. But if we here have some kind of common language, even if it isn't perfect, it will make discussions much easier (and shorter).

• Track:
  A collection of trackpoints that are connected.
• Route:
  A track whose trackpoints have no timestamps, i.e. a planned track.
• Recorded track:
  A track whose trackpoints have timestamps.
• POI (points of interest):
  The points defined globally in Data > Points. Can be shown/hidden individually.
• Trackpoints:
  The individual points that a track consists of (with or without timestamp).
• Waypoints:
  Specific points that have the same attributes as POIs, but belong to a track and will be shown/hidden together with the track (not individually). Waypoints do not need to be at the same position as a trackpoint, however waypoints created while recording will be.
• Navpoint (Navigation waypoint):
  Special waypoints with a fixed set of types that trigger specific actions (speech output, etc.) while navigating. Furthermore, they're always attached to a trackpoint.

As I said, this is open for discussion - but probably at some point the "Locus godfathers" should decide what to use.

@slarti76: http://docs.locusmap.eu/doku.php?id=manual:faq:question#i_ve_got_an_idea_how_to_improve_locus_whom_should_i_tell

Yeah, I know Just didn't find the time to write it down yet. Btw: I'm Ingo Rau on helpdesk...

Done: http://help.locusmap.eu/topic/edit-track-creation-of-waypoints

@slarti76: http://docs.locusmap.eu/doku.php?id=manual:faq:question#i_ve_got_an_idea_how_to_improve_locus_whom_should_i_tell

Yeah, I know Just didn't find the time to write it down yet. Btw: I'm Ingo Rau on helpdesk...

I should probably add that I only think the style selection is good as it it. The whole MapsForge 0.5 concept of overlays sounds pretty great and it would really love to see something like that in Locus, at least the ability to choose what POIs are shown as part of the map.
Related discussions:
http://help.locusmap.eu/topic/how-to-choose-poi%C2%B4s-offline-db-poi
http://forum.locusmap.eu/index.php?topic=4459.0

Menion understood me correctly. And thinking about it again, I think he's right: It's not that big deal. I prefer the internal theme with switching dialog, but this is only "proof-of-concept", as the user has to download the theme file manually.
I just hope that other theme developers will support the Locus solution soon. However, I'm not very optimistic about the Elevate themes, as the developer already implemented MapForge 0.5, and I'm not betting on them to support two different solutions at the same time...

[Insert/edit trackpoint]

That is very nice, but I can't see why only navigation waypoint? There's a lot of cases when I would later like to add a waypoint to a recorded track that I forgot on the road - but I can't. I can only add "global" points,

take a look on last section Insert/edit trackpoint
http://docs.locusmap.eu/doku.php?id=manual:user_guide:tracks:planning&s[]=add&s[]=trackpoint

Sorry, I think you got me wrong: Editing trackpoints is not the issue, it's the new converting into a waypoint. I know, the words can be confusing and are used differently by different people, but I just used the same terminology as in Locus.
So I have a track (consisting of trackpoints) and want some of those points to be waypoints, just like when I added them while recording. Right now, that's only possible for that specific set of navigation waypoints.

Something else:
New in 3.8.x is the ability to "convert [a trackpoint] to a navigation waypoint".
That is very nice, but I can't see why only navigation waypoint? There's a lot of cases when I would later like to add a waypoint to a recorded track that I forgot on the road - but I can't. I can only add "global" points, but that often makes no sense (example: "Begin of climbing part" is specific to a track and not to the map).
I can't imagine that's a technical problem - the dialog would be the same as the one opened while recording.

OK, yeah, tried it and works fine. Now if there only were a way to hide the 5 internal themes so to get a cleaner quick-switch dialog (got several OAM themes plus the V-Scale2 Pure...). Is that planned?

Thx a lot! Now I'll have to try this out, from the discussion I'm not really sure yet what this feature offers...

Wanted to try this out, but the link above (http://docs.locusmap.eu/doku.php?id=manual:map_tools:vector_maps_content&#internal_themes) doesn't work?! Also trying it manually (Advanced -> Advanced Map Tools -> Locus Map Theming) gives error message "This topic does not exist yet".

[edit]

Update to new version removed my current controls in top panel, have to add them back again. It's not a big deal, but it's always a little annoying if you have to redo settings.
Probably you did this so we have to test the new system to set up the controls

And a tiny typo: When opening the new setting "Tracks popup content", the dialog title is "Points popup content". Settings are those for tracks, that's correct, just the title wrong. Somebody copied & pasted 

edit
I just realized that the new flowing of icons between top and right panels offers an easy way to improve display in landscape mode. Please check this out: http://help.locusmap.eu/topic/top-right-panel-different-number-of-icons-for-portrait-landscape

I tried two BT-GPS devices (Garmin Glo and GNS 2000), and returned them both.
Main reason was that the precision wasn't better (or even worse) than my Galaxy S4 itself. Especially annoying was that both transmitted a precision that was obviously nonsense (GNS 2000 almost always had <2m), whereas the S4's values are usually reasonably close to reality.
The second reason was that the battery saving effect was much less than I had hoped for. I was surprised to learn that the internal GPS alone doesn't draw that much anyway (put your phone into flight mode and do some GPS logging to check out). Especially when you got mobile network on anyway, the difference is hardly noticeable.
Of course, your experience may be different, especially depending on phone. But obviously, some more or less current high-end phone already has very low power consumption and good precision with internal GPS.

There are three possible answers to limiting the vector map symbols:

A different one is the possibility that mapsforge 0.5 style menus could be added to Locus, as discussed here:
http://forum.locusmap.eu/index.php?topic=4311.0
This allows adding different map items to categories, which can be switched on and off. Have a look at the preview version of Elevate 3, which isn't compatible with Locus (yet), but I added different groups of switchable POIs:
http://www.openandromaps.org/en/oam-forums/topic/elevate-updates-and-test-versions-news#post-4059
It can be easily tested with Atlas on the Desktop:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Atlas_%28navigation_application%29
Best regards,
Tobias

That's all very interesting, but will make things even more complex.
Now we have the ability for the theme creator to define switchable layers, but also, the user wants to be able to turn on/off specific POIs.

I'm wondering if this could be combined:
If the layer mechanism of the themes is integrated in Locus, then it could offer to add user-defined layers that have the same abilities. So no additional/differing logic, "just" (yes, I know...) a GUI to define a layer in the app. The layer could then be stored interchangeably in the same XML format (not in the theme, of course). These user-defined layers would be independent of the theme and could be applied to any theme. Now we only need a quick-layer button for the sidebar, which opens a dialog (which also contains the theme's layers) with layer toggle switches, and we're done 
(I hope you can understand what I'm writing...)

I know, this is rather a big development effort, but I think it would be the biggest most useful feature for Locus imaginable (apart from my favorite, the points/tracks sync).