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Bringing geolocation into Gnome

February 8th, 2009 by Pierre-Luc Beaudoin

This week-end, I presented a talk at FOSDEM about how “Bringing geolocation into GNOME”. While giving some background definitions and ideas for geolocation, it mostly covered what are technologies currently available to achieve these goals.

I have the impression that the talk was well received, it certainly boosted my interest into spending long nights infront of the screen pushing libchamplain forward much more!

All of the demonstrated code is already available. For EOG plugin, see the EOG-plugins svn repo, a release should be available in the Gnome 2.28 timeframe. For the Empathy Geolocation, it is available in my empathy repo, and the telepathy parts already have been released. This feature should be merged first thing in the 2.27 development cycle, allowing a smooth testing period before 2.28. As for Emerillion, it was the first public mention of this promizing application. It shall be announced in a close future.

To make this presentation, I used clutter-toys/opt, a clutter based presentation tools. The slides are defined in a xml file. I enhanced it to support embedded maps. So if you add the following xml code, you’ll have an interactive map of Brussels, with very usefull places marked, right into your slide! Grab the branch into my clutter-toys repo.

<map width="600" height="500" zoom-level="13" latitude="50.84" longitude="4.37">
      <marker latitude="50.842966" longitude="4.35153">Porte Noire</marker>
      <marker latitude="50.845127" longitude="4.349878">Mannequin Pis</marker>
      <marker latitude="50.848548" longitude="4.353633">Délirium Café</marker>
      <marker latitude="50.821391" longitude="4.39393">Université Libre</marker>
</map>

13 Responses

Craig writes:

February 8th, 2009 at 12:41

Wow, this stuff is AWESOME. I don’t know what else to say!

Stephane "matrixise" Wirtel writes:

February 8th, 2009 at 12:44

Hi Pierre-Luc,

Thank you for your conference and Welcome in Belgium.

And keep going !

Sense Hofstede writes:

February 8th, 2009 at 13:11

Impressive presentation! I’m looking forward to its implementation in GNOME!

Michel Leunen writes:

February 8th, 2009 at 13:30

Just a quick note: it’s Manneken Pis and not Mannequin Pis.

Tobias writes:

February 8th, 2009 at 14:14

“For EOG plugin, see the EOG-plugins svn repo, a release should be available in the Gnome 2.28 timeframe.”

Didn’t you mean 2.26?

Jens writes:

February 9th, 2009 at 5:50

When I fist saw the stuff for IM I thought like WTF will that do about my privacy; but then I saw your demonstration at FOSDEM. This stuff rocks!

Pierre-Luc Beaudoin writes:

February 9th, 2009 at 5:51

Tobias: nah it is really 2.28. There hasn’t been a release of EOG-plugins yet, but it will happen for the 2.28 timeframe, giving us time to improve bits of it

Michel: right, I often tend to remember words by what it sounds like, and in that case, a statue is also a sort of mannequin hehe but yeah, thanks.

Adrian Custer writes:

February 9th, 2009 at 16:13

Hey,

by very, very long tradition, the order of geographic coordinates is:

lat —- long

whenever you have a choice (i.e. method calls, display). It’s a natural tendency of the modern (web) based clients to work the other way around (since we think x,y) but most people working the field eventually realize the importance of the tradition is worth preserving.

We spend lots and lots of time explaining this to our users and axis order, once you start working with vector data, is one of the major headaches. This will, of course, never be resolved once and for all, but it’s worth not doing the naive thing and being consistent.

The international standards are all trying to bring their specs back to lat/long order (with some painful exceptions). Apparently in aviation there are laws to this effect…

cheers,
adrian

Pierre-Luc Beaudoin writes:

February 9th, 2009 at 18:25

Adrian: thanks for highlighting that fact, I did realize that just before releasing 0.2.1, where all API was lon, lat. I changed it to reflect most common usage of lat, lon.

I still have a tendancy to write lon, lat - and to be honnest, in XML it doesn’t matter as the attributes are named, therefore, can’t be mixed up

Javier writes:

February 22nd, 2009 at 11:29

Hello,

thank you, this stuff is AWESOME

Any version planned to maemo platform?

Pierre-Luc Beaudoin writes:

February 23rd, 2009 at 5:55

Well, we know that Maemo 5 will support clutter (announced at Maemo Summit in october). We’ll see then they release more information if it’ll run on it!

Pierre-Luc Beaudoin » Blog Archive » libchamplain progress in Febuary writes:

February 25th, 2009 at 16:53

[...] this (IMHO) successful presentation at FOSDEM, people spontaneously offered their help. Many more showed their interest into the ideas or to [...]

Javier writes:

April 1st, 2009 at 20:08

Hello again Pierre,

any plan to make a Ubuntu PPA ( https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+ppas ) so we can test it?