[Roadster] state of the roadster

[Ian McIntosh]

Hi Everyone,

Update time.

First, personal: I am still in South America, but perhaps more settled
now.  I would very much like to continue working on Roadster.

Up until this point, Roadster has had only a few people working on it.
If Roadster is going to be a success, it'll take many more people
contributing.

So, this is a call for help!  This mailing list has 70+ subscribers now,
and I'm hoping there are some people here who want to get involved.

In addition to bringing more people in, I'd like to reduce the scope of
the project for version 1.0.

Version 1.0 feature proposal
============================
1) move map data loading (and rendering?) functionality to an external
library (libroadster?)

2) external library will use a better (faster/smaller) data format (no
more MySQL GIS) stored in a SQLite database

3) ability to zoom from street level to state/country level *quickly*
(which probably means storing data at several levels-of-detail)

4) a new GUI in a high level language (C#, Ruby, Python?) with only
basic map navigation functionality (mouse drag, edge scroll, zoom
buttons, zoom rect tool, history back/forward buttons)
============================

I see this as a solid base for more advanced functionality, and we can
decide later where it should be added (in the application, in the
library, or as an application plugin).

At that point, multiple frontends could be developed independently using
native toolkits (GTK+, QT, Cocoa, Win32).

So that's the vision.  What do you think??

-Ian