Survex on PDA

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 11:44:18PM +0100, Wookey wrote:
> On 2006-10-16 19:45 -0200, Carlos Guâno Grohmann wrote:
> > So, I was thinking about running Survex (cavern+aven) + Therion on a
> > Linux-based PDA.. any advices on that? Which model would be better,
> > etc..
> 
> I did this a few years ago on an ipaq (3630 vintage). I used xcaverot
> because aven was too heavy for it. (and the uncluttered screen works
> better on a 1/4 VGA device. I also had to write a slightly modified
> version to allow switching between mouse-button modes (because a
> touchscreen only has one type of button, and xcaverot/aven rely
> heavily on left ans right clicks). Using a PDA modifier button would
> work better, but is quite device specific. 'PDA mode' code should
> still be in xcavrot codebase.

It is, though the xcaverot code is only in the 1.0 branch now.
Something similar to the "PDA mode" could be added to aven though.
Also, the depth bar, compass, clino, and scale bar could be
automatically being made smaller if the window size is small.

Aven uses wxWidgets for the GUI, which has support for various PDA
devices which should help.  However, I don't have access to any
such devices (except very occasionally via Wookey) so it's not
something I've really looked at in detail.

Survex 1.1 development snapshots assume OpenGL is available, and
xcaverot has been removed in favour of aven.  This is fine for modern
desktops, but probably not for PDAs and the like.  We can keep Survex
1.0 alive for them, or perhaps look at implementing a non-OpenGL display
backend.  The OpenGL code is mostly encapsulated behind a more
generalised API, and implementing everything except 3d polygons using a
2D drawing API shouldn't be too hard.

Cheers,
    Olly