Monday, February 2, 2015

Scope explosion! ...but let's just call it an open alpha

Last November, I started to tinker with Sierra Mapper.

Initially, I just wanted to add off-trail travel.

Once that was working, I was dissatisfied with the major drawback--that there were no labels on the elevation profiles for the off-trail segments. To add labels to the off-trail segments would require a total revamp of how the profile labels were generated. Total revamp--no problem. I dug in.

I soon1 had that working, and with a bit of algorithm massage, reduced the amount of time it took to generate the profiles to a palatable amount.

"Cool," I thought, "Time to share this with all the people that care about Sierra Mapper2!"

But I didn't, because then I decided that adding kml importing should be pretty easy--I had the labelled profile problem solved for arbitrary paths, after all. And how about a route database? And in that database, can I include links to useful things?

Oh, and the on-the-fly route calculations--I should improve that.

So I did all that. But I didn't stop along the way to fix the bugs, and still haven't done it because fixing the bugs will be a lot of work, and if this isn't moving in the right direction, there's no need to spend my free time chasing out-of-whack counters and sluggish Ajax requests.

So--intrepid mapper--take the alpha for a spin. There's a link to it above (and also here: OMG!).

I'll detail the added features, how to use them, and the known bugs in upcoming posts.


1 "Soon" in the geological timescale context
2 Both of them

Nobody likes a blog post without any pictures