Life Hacks Really Do Work!

Hey all!

As my friend John Layt suggest I'll give you a little recap on what I'm doing. My GSoC project is to implement a nice Open Street Map annotation framework to make the lives of all you mappers a little bit easier! More info can be found on my proposal blog post. The thing that has really been a challenge with this project was the fact that I'm adding support for a QGraphicsItem like API to marble. Little bit hairy at times but its good fun too! This has really come quite far in the last week and you can see quite an exciting example of this in the video below ( planet viewers have to come to my blog because the planet doesn't embed embedded youtube for some reason ).

Starting Monday I brought out a little "life hack" that I used quite a lot in my last year of college. Quit simple, very loosely based on the "Getting Things Done" idea and it can be really effective when you have something that doesn't have a strict system of "This must be done by this time" or "This must be done first". Maybe I might blog about it sometime ;)

With this new life hack in hand I have fixed two bugs, closed one bug, identified the cause of another bug, cleaned up most of my code, made the Marble plugin system more flexible, started implementing default base GeoGraphicsItem classes ( quite similar to the idea of QGrahpicsLineItem being a default implementation of QGraphicsItem ), fixed the problem with the GeoXmlParser that was preventing me from loading OSM files and made my little text editor a damn sight more pretty! Wow that was a mouthful!

Now with that all under my belt I announce this little clip of the results. As you all know a lot of the stuff I was doing is hidden from view, and also a lot of it is very much visible but just being done a different way but I think it looks pretty cool too ;)



(Link for people reading on the planet)

There are some very exciting things planned for the coming week ( and even just today ) so watch this space. I hope you all like my little updates, if any of you would like me to go into any more detail about anything just drop me a line ( comment or email ) and I'm sure I can accommodate you in some way!

Happy Coding!