Thread: A few suggestions

Originally Posted by marchello2000

First of all I just want to say - awesome product with great potential. I was telling people about my ideas and they were thikning I am crazy... Imagine my happiness when I saw 90% of it implemented!

Anyway, here are my suggestions/questions/etc:
1. QWERTY Keyboard - oh the frustration with the current keyboard...

2. Why can't my passenger enter an address while I am driving. I mean, I understand the whole driver distraction thing, but this is what always annoyed me with other software. Can this be disabled? Or, if not, it's silly to let the person enter the address, then, when he hits "search", say that the feature is not availble while driving - entering the address should be blocked, not searching

3. Map text can be upside down. I understand that this is a side effect of having MapPoint render the maps, are you just rendering to an offscreen DC, then bitblt'ing it? Perhaps we can find a better way, let's talk offline.

4. I think the installer should just add SD to startup...

5. I've noticed that SD will sometimes spontaneously exit without sending an error report. I've had this happen when using/throwing C++ exceptions with an installed SEH top level exception handler (which is what I assume you are doing). It was not terribly important for me so I did not investigate at the time, but I think a top level try...catch with a call to MiniDumpWriteDump will fix this.

6. If I am a developer, how do I go about using SD? I have a licensed version in the car pc, but I would never develop on it, is there a special download for the home computer, what am I missing?


Thanks and keep up the awesome job!

Mark

p.s. Sprry for the technical assumptions - I am a developer - fogive me!

1. It has been asked for before, but it will be a small project in itself to have the keyboard also support QWERTY. It may happen some day though.

2. The safety features are in there for safety and our liability, I can't offer advice on how to bypass them.

3. Although, I'll agree it certainly looks wierd, the text being upside down shouldn't really effect your ability to read it. If you don't believe me, just turn a book upside down and see how well you can read it. That being said, the upside down text, is more of a take what you can get kind of thing then a designed feature, I think there are certainly improvements that can be made to how the text is rendered, but I don't think any practical improvements will be had from simply rendering all the same text that is there now, right side up. The real challenge for navigation is getting the text to render in a context aware way showing the names of upcoming intersections and filtering out all the other streets that are not important given your current location. Finding an efficient way to do this has been given a lot of thought, but not something we have been able to implement well yet. Capturing the map is significantly more involved then a few bitblts, but feel free to PM me if you have any more ideas.

4. StreetDeck was designed to be started from hibernate / standby so in a typical in car installation, if your simply starting up, it would mean something untypical has happened that you might want to investigate. We also have to support laptops and other devices that come out of the car for people who might not be technically adept enough to know what an application has started up automatically completely taking away thier nice windows desktop. We do install a startup shortcut on our bundled systems, but for the software only download, we leave the responsibility on the user to put it in thier startup folder based on thier needs.

5. Are you running 1.0.4.9 with the -NoBackgroundMP3 option? There is a recent bug that may cause bad problems, if not.

6. Just install the streetdeck trial on your home computer and run the dev tools. They will not time out.

#2!

Is there anyway us as the consumer can sign a waiver to let this feature work while the vehicle is moving. I fully understand your liabilities but let's face it, this almost makes the navigation not worth using. The reason I purchased SD is because it had the nice frontend and a Nav package, well worth it but take out the Nav portion and we're coming close to what is out there for free.

For the record, I know about the switch that makes it work but everytime the vehicle resumes from standby the software alerts you that it is in that mode, quite annoying.

Troy

Follow up..........................

Guys, please do not PM me about the switch. Though I enjoy sharing anything when it comes to the carputer stuff I cannot go against the grain on this. I will say however that it is very easily found in these forums.

Originally Posted by marchello2000

I agree, but, in this case, allowing me to enter an address and blocking search is silly, and may still hold you liable.

I misread what you were asking, that is a bug and will be fixed.

Originally Posted by marchello2000

I believe you, and I am not complaining that I can't read it, I am just saying that this is "uncool" as far as other products are concerned. Really, you have an awesome product with awesome UI (minus the non QWERT keyboard ). All I am saying that it detracts from overall experience.
I also did not mean to diminish the complexity of drawing the map by saying it's just a bitblt, sorry if that came out wrong. I will ping you offline.

Yeah, its not a feature, but I just meant to say that its a difficult problem not worth fixing since that same time would be enough to implement it in a way that both looks and works better.

Originally Posted by marchello2000

Ah, beauty, thanks! Btw, is there a way to minimize SD window while developing (or not make it topmost, aside from fidling with window styles ? Single mon = real estate really precious

There really should be and will be, but no theres still some technical issues that make that hard and me using 3 monitors to develop doesnt help

Originally Posted by marchello2000

Also, will I be able to develop a plugin in C/C++?

Not really, the SDK only uses VBScript, but you can load any COM object in it, so you can do most of the heavy lifting by writing a backend C++ COM component, load it into the SDK, then drag and drop some controls and tie them into your com object.