Kosmos Future

This page contains information about what's coming in next releases of Kosmos. It also contains (more or less) up-to-date information about the development status of individual features and my (User:Breki) assessment of when you can expect new releases.

UPDATE: this page needs a thorough update. I haven't been releasing any new 2.x versions for a long time. To see what's been happening, read my blog posts on Kosmos. --Breki 20:18, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

The last section contains a "wishlist" of features which will hopefully be implemented some time in the future. If you have a particular idea on what you would want to see in Kosmos, please write it down on the talk page and if I'll add a short entry into the wishlist if I see that the idea makes sense.

Contents 1 Release 2.3 2 Future 3 Wishlist 3.1 Linux port

Release 2.3

Released on 13th November

• Various memory and speed optimizations - FINISHED
• Full Map Mode menu item for showing only the map (hiding other windows) - FINISHED
• Improved reading and writing of OSM files - FINISHED
• Support for icons on areas - FINISHED
• TextLineOffset-ing available for Node, AreaCenter and WayCenter text modes - FINISHED
• Update OSM Data menu item for updating the contents of OSM file using OSMXAPI - FINISHED
• Max zoom factor setting to limit the allowed zoom level. This is in order to avoid application freezing up on high zooms - FINISHED
• Slippymap directly integrated into the main map - FINISHED

Future

• Support for cached Mgmaps tiles as slippymap - TO BE DONE
• Generating maps tiles directly from the GUI - TO BE DONE
• Specifying the user-defined extents of the map. This would make a lot of things easier - TO BE DONE
• Support for customizing contours generation (elevation steps) - IN PROGRESS
• Route planner - creating, editing and uploading to GPS unit of routes using OSM data - IN PROGRESS
• Importing georeferenced bitmaps (using world files) - TO BE DONE
• A standalone prototype 3D rendering of OSM maps - POSTPONED (need time to properly learn 3D graphics :) ) blog post about experiments
• Hopefully solving the problems with tile server instability. Also providing code for IIS tile serving, which should be more stable.
• Integrating WorldFlier into the main Kosmos GUI
• Exporting and importing georeferenced GeoTIFF bitmaps
• Support for high-resolution SRTM data (USA)
• Drawing elevation profiles (for GPX data and other routes)
• Editing GPX data
• Editing rendering style for GPX files and contours
• Rendering rules editor
• Map legend generator
• Selecting rendering rules from a list of all available ones in the Wiki (using the Kosmos rules category)
• More work on relations support - how to distinguish between the relation's tags and member's tags in rules?
• Abbreviating geo names using lookup tables

Wishlist

Export of .png and georeferenced mapfile (.map) for Oziexplorer or OziCE.

Or even better support of the same files like taho.pl: Oziexplorer#Generate_an_pixel_map_with_calibration_using_tiles.40home_tiles

See the .map file-format

Linux port

I've just executed Kosmos 2.3.213.0 on my Linux box out of interest. WINE suggested installing the windows version of Mono, which I did. And the most interesting part: Kosmos worked :) Here's a screenshot:

Of course, it works really-really slow, especially while re-rendering the map. But I think that's a good sign that the porting wouldn't be so difficult :) Or at least debugging the windows build, so that it works fast under Wine.

PS - the software versions used:

• Debian GNU/Linux sid x86_64
• WINE 1.1.11
• Mono win32 v2.0.1
• Kosmos 2.3.213.0

I've done some work on Linux porting for 1.x versions, but then I gave up mostly because of the speed issue (and because even supporting Windows takes a lot of my time). Implementing Kosmos so that it would work as quickly on Linux as it does on Windows would be a huge task, for which I just don't have the time. A large part of the graphics rendering code would probably have to be ported to some Mono graphics library, which requires a lot of work. Nevertheless hats off to Mono guys for doing a great job - I didn't expect Kosmos 2.x would still run on Linux. --Breki 18:26, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I was also amazed to see it running. Mainly posted the info here so that you're familiar with the current situation on that field. Keep up the good work!

PS - I tried it now under the newest version of wine - 1.1.12 - and it doesn't work again... -- Jekader 23:20, 10 January 2009 (UTC)