Survex on a PDA?

[Olly Betts]

On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 03:09:58PM +0100, Wookey wrote:
> +++ Josep Guarro [04-10-08 15:53 +0200]:
> > I was just thinking if it is possible to run Survex (Cavern & Aven) on
> > the PDA Sharp Zaurus wich is operated with Linux OS.
> > 
> > Is it possible?
> 
> It should be - I ran survex on an ipaq a year or so ago. I used xcaverot
> rather than aven at that time (much smaller footprint) and it now has a
> 'pda' mode which is automatically used when the screen is smaller than VGA.
> This has smaller controls and adds a 'left/right click' mode button to deal
> with the single-type-of-click touchscreen control.

Would aven be usable on this sort of device with minor adjustments
(smaller controls, maybe making the side panel and main view tabs,
etc)?  Or are more major changes required?

> Last week I got aven and therion and survex installed on a 'minilaptop/big
> PDA' which is arm based (with a keybaord and 800x600 screen)

That's more like a laptop from a few years ago - perhaps a little
slower, but 800x600 is a totally usable screensize.

Another question I have is how does opengl perform on these devices?  I
fired up 1.1.1 on a very old win98 box which used to belong to my
brother's father-in-law.  The wrong graphics card driver is installed so
it only works in 16 colours, but I was suprised to find that even with
dithered colours and no hardware 3D acceleration it ran acceptably.

> > It should be much better than dealing with Auriga on the Palm....

The new Palm models apparently have a much more standard C environment
(the old models used persistent memory rather than files).  Also
someone's working on getting wxWindows going on them.

> It is pretty nifty. Again - some changes are needed for touscreen control
> (no right-click).

Do we need an on screen "action" selector (rotate/tilt/drag)?  Or are
there buttons on the device we can use as modifiers?

Cheers,
    Olly