Arathranar

Ok. Tried out the new version. Not having to remember what order I added places is a definite plus

A couple of thoughts:
1. Having to click exit 3 times is overkill. 2 times I can see but 3 times seems unnecessary.
2. The first thing I do every time I start the app and switch to the navigation page is zoom right back in again. It would be great if it remembered how zoomed in I was when I last used the software.

When I go to the options page and exit any way (cancel or done), the app goes into a 100% cpu hang. I'm using the Zorro skin (very nice btw!) in case that's relevant.

Another thing that seems to be the case is that AutoTouch is more 'lagged' than MapPoint which in turn is more 'lagged' than S&T 2005. Perhaps you could do some simple linear prediction based off direction and speed to compensate for the delay? Or maybe it's just that my machine is so slow...!

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wizawuza

what speed machine you got arathranar?

Arathranar

NEC Tablet PC 933MHz P3 with a slow hard drive.

Gremlin

Yeah, I kind of agree, but the first time is actually a menu with the choices of hibernate and exit, and I didn't like the chance you might hit exit accidentally since it would lose the constructed list of playing songs and navigation. I always hibernate and almost never exit so I guess it doesn't bug me. If more folks want the second dialog gone it's easy enough to do.


Me too! Unfortunately there's no option for this in Map Point, the operations are zoom in/zoom out, there is no way to tell the current zoom level I thought about tracking zoom in and zoom outs but there's a lot of problems with trying that. Again, I don't exit that often... I've made the suggestion to MapPoint via the appropriate channels that the next version include this feature


For ever? Or just for a few seconds? I've not seen this sort of behaviour, does it happen with a Skin other than Zorro?


Do you have Rotation turned on? That will slow it down somewhat, the next thing is that there is a GPSDelay= that can be added under the NavOptions, set this to zero or 1 and it'll increase the delay. This is so that slower processors can handle doing the rotation, for instance on my Epia M10000 if I don't use this setting on 3 it doesn't work.

Hope that helps

-G

camsgs3

is it just me , that i cant access the webpage,ive been trying for like 2 weeks and no luck - but when im at work it loads up fine

im running XP SP2,IE6

Arathranar

As far as I tested - forever and it was consistently doing it. But no repro at all now!

Tracking the zoom level would make me happy :-). As would remembering the location you were at the last time the software was run and defaulting to showing that. It's more likely to be right than some place in the middle of the states.

The menus are the thing I like least about the whole product. Having to restrict the user to such a small vertical area isn't optimizing the touch / visual experience. Covering more of the screen and using some nice icons would be great.

Turning rotation off helped a bit. One thing I noticed is that even with rotation off, the cpu spike as AutoTouch does work is a lot higher (80% with rotation off, 100% with it on) than MapPoint itself (steady around 30-40%).

Gremlin

Well I'd love a way to track the zoom level but it's currently not possible.

Hmm, I hadn't really thought about changing the menus, the idea was to make them simple and useable without taking up a lot of space, but that's an interesting idea. What I would basically have to do was make the menu's skinnable and then we could do more things with them. I'll look into that. If you've got suggestions for what the menus might look like please post them!

As for the rotation off helping, it would, because MapPoint doesn't support rotation what I do is draw the mappoint window off screen take a screen shot of it and then rotate that bitmap and draw it on screen, pretty intensive.

Aranthar, How much RAM in your laptop, I wonder if we're hitting a swap case. I'm using the .NET Framework which combined with mappoint can be a bit of a memory pig, I'm able to run it without pegging the CPU on a EDEN M10000 with 512MB (At least I think that's how much it has!) so if you have less than that I wonder if we're hitting a swap condition, you could view this with task manager and let me know!

-G

strohj

I am having similar performance issues ony my carpc.. I have the EDEN M12000 with 512Mb ram....

I did notice that the audio controls lag a bit when i am in navigation mode.... Especially if i have shuffle and map rotation turned on...

Skinning the menu's would be great... As soon as I get home tonight.. I will post my brushed metal skin on here for everyone..

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Arathranar

If it always starts zoomed fully out why can't you just count the number of zoom ins and zoom outs? Then at start up, re-apply them. Even if it screws up, the worst case is that you are still at the wrong zoom level, but probably closer.

I have 512 Mb. To be honest, I have to worry about performance for all the code I write - I may just be being picky.

Gremlin

The problem with tracking the zooms is the number of ways it screws up, it's actually an interesting problem, since when you're in navigation mode asking mappoint to show the current direction will cause yet another zoom level to be show, so I'm not even sure where to begin counting zoom-ins, and when to count zoom-outs. The net effect would end up being I always end up zoomed in. That's probably more of what you want. I wonder if it would be sufficient to offer a start with this many zoom ins in a skin? That way you'd be able to change it and it would be predictable.

As for the performance, I'm not sure what's up with that can you tell me what task manager reports for mem usage, and if you're hitting swap. I've actually done a bunch of work to optimise the code thats there for speed, and it runs quite nicely on my car computer now, as for the button lag on the nav screen I'll ahve to check it out since my skin doesn't make use of that feature (it was added at Strohj's request!)

-G

Arathranar

Yep - that's what occurred to me on the way to work. Just offering two configurable values - number of zooms to apply at startup (9 is the max - and it really seems more like 8.25 since the last click doesn't zoom much); and number of zooms to apply when entering navigation mose (2 is the max). That is far simpler and less error prone than tracking zooms in/out and trying to maintain that.

I'm mostly comparing it to MapPoint and S&T run standalone. Both use about a steady 40% cpu and are updating much more frequently. The end result is that when travelling in a straight line, the position shown is closer to where the car actually is.

Cpu usage I see is ~20-40% mappoint and ~40-60% autotouch *when* it's doing work (i.e during the spikes). It may just be that you're paying a lot of cost for the graphics rendering in managed (it uses gdi+ and that's not a very cpu friendly piece of code).

One thought I had about perf - can you use MapPoint in way to get various map tiles and do the recombination yourself. I.e. reduce the frequency you need to ask mappoint for a map and potentially reduce the work to rotate it. If you reduced the granularity on the map rotation some, you could be able to re-use the rotated image more often (e.g. when travelling in a straight line) and just keep adding on new bits from the next tile in memory.

The settings hang came back - it only happens when the GPS is connected. When I kill AutoTouch via task manager, MapPoint then crashes.

Gremlin

Yes I agree this is the best solution On my web site now http://www.sarinarts.com/autotouch.htm you'll find version 0.62 (or you can grab just the exe at http://www.sarinarts.com/autotouch.exe if you already had version 0.61) You'll find a version with two additional attributes in the NavOptions the string should look like this:

<NavOptions Rotate="false" Port="-1" StartMapZoom="9" AfterRouteMapZoom="5"/>

The numbers for StartMapZoom and AfterRouteMapZoom are what you want to mess with.


Well you still haven't answered my question about if your machine is sawpping? Could you let me know about this. It's not a problem I'm seeing when I watch the performance meter, I'll need to try and watch with my CarPC instaed of my laptop and desktop.

There is no way to get tiles from MapPoint, the Object model supports nothing like this. Like I said it sounds like you're going to have to run with the rotation off.


[/QUOTE]

Known issue with MapPoint if you close it down improperly. I'm not sure what's going on with the GPS connect. You said this happens on CANCEL or OKAY? I'm going to check out the code path on both cases to see what's in it. What sort of GPS do you have?

-G

rando

Do you have any plans to release the source code?

Also, I can't seem to geta successful download. The download always stalls -- at a different spot each time. Is anyone else having this problem?

Finally, are you sure it isn't possible to control the zoom level precisely? My (limited) experience with MP04 is that you can set the zoomlevel precisely using the map.altitude property. You need to maintain the current setting external to mappoint though because when you read the altitude property, mappoint has a tendancy to round it based on an algorithm I haven't yet deciphered. So bascially any time that mappoint automagically adjusts the zoomlevel, you will have no way of knowing (precisely) what the zoom level is. If you set it, however, you will know.

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Gremlin

Not currently, I'd like to keep control of it for the moment.


I apologise for those issues, I know the server has had a problem or two. Unfortunately I don't have another location that I can host it. If anyone else can host a copy could they let me know?


[/QUOTE]

I didn't know about this property, or rather I thought this basically just told you the altitude of the land at that point. I will play with it and see if I can't figure out if it can work.

rando

Yah, the altitude property will do what you want ... it's what I'm using on my own front-end. Mine is nearly ready for use yet though. I understand about not wanting to give away your entire source base. Would you be willing to provide a snippet or even a skeleton of how you handle the turn-by-turn stuff in MP04? I want to add this capability to my own software but haven't given it a close look yet. It would be nice to save some time using something that's already working.

Also, since I can't get your software to download, there is one more question I wanted to ask about rotation. I had thought about doing this outside of MP too -- as you've described. The only problem I was that there wasn't any way I could see to get the fonts to show correct (i.e. never more than 90 degrees from horizontal). I assume your map rotation produces rotated fonts such that some of the text is actually upside down. Is that right?

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