[Roadster] mouse-over info

Ian McIntosh ian_mcintosh at linuxadvocate.org
Wed Mar 16 15:02:43 PST 2005


Hi Dustin,

On Thu, 2005-02-24 at 12:08 +0000, Dustin kirkland wrote:
> I like the idea of a mouse rollover + a status bar, especially where
> this greatly reduces clutter, like in a middle-range zoom of a big
> city.

Exactly.  And it's likely that this will make it in.  I'm holding off on
it until the in-memory data structures gel.

> The status bar could consists a a configurable list of fields, with a
> user choosing which to include/exclude  Here are some examples:
> GPS coordinates, latitude, longitude, elevation
> Country, state, county, city, street, address number
> (basically any information you have or can infer about a given point)

I think the GPS tab on the sidebar will hold a lot of this info.

Once we can find out info about a point (like what city it's in) I think
we'll show that information somewhere, probably in a "Country  State
City  Area" format along the top or bottom of the map area.

> 1) How about a KRuler-like feature that you can lift and move around
> and stretch from point to point across the map, giving as-the-crow
> flies distances (in practically any unit of length)?  This helps with
> unmarked pathways, such as hiking trails, biking trails, and canoeing
> streams.

I'm not sure how KRuler works.  (More familiar with GRuler-- wrote it!)
This either belongs as a "measurement" tool or perhaps part of some
tracks/waypoints creator.  Consider: As part of a track creator, you
could make and measure tracks with multiple points, save tracks, and see
tracks even when the "measurement" tool wasn't selected.  It would also
be less UI (assuming we're already going to have tracks), and less UI is
good.  The downside is a ruler tool is perhaps more clear.  What do you
think?

> I would like to use Roadster to say, "List all ski resorts
> sorted by distance to my current location."  Or, "List all state

This "sorted by distance to my current location" is what we recently
decided on for the results list.  It's how the address search works now,
and I _really_ like the behavior.  It almost always gets it correct.  

We may end up weighting the results slightly by type of result, so a
search for "Boston" will list the 10-miles-away city before matching the
2-miles-away street.  But I digress.  Back to POI searching.

If we use the same behavior for POI results (which is the plan) then
it's only a matter of you having POI for ski resorts on your computer.
Roadster will definitely allow people to create and share POI sets, and
probably even subscribe to them so they get updated automatically.

I think there is a lot of opportunity for website integration, too.  As
mentioned above, Roadster should/will always know the City, State,
Country, and ZIP of the current location, so it will be easy to craft
custom URLs based on this info.  We could do what Firefox does with its
custom search box.  Users could add URLs containing %ZIP% or something.
Here's an example url[1] for Target stores built using just a zip code. 

-Ian

[1]
http://target.com/target_group/storelocator/map.jhtml?streetaddress=&city=&state=&zip=02140&clientPOI2=1&closestn=3&closestprox=1&miles=200&screen=find&link=results&width=850&height=338



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