[OSM-dev] [OSM-talk] GSoC'10

steve brown steve at evolvedlight.co.uk
Tue Mar 16 01:42:24 GMT 2010


Hey

As promised, here is my proposal:

Name: Stephen Brown
Emails: steve at evolvedlight.co.uk, s.brown.11 at warwick.ac.uk
Websites/blog/OSM user page: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/evolvedlight


List of Languages known(please rate strength in the scale of 10):
Rails 7/10, worked for two summers at a housing management solutions company
that was rebuilding their flagship application in Rails. Personal projects
such as youthweekends.com also use ruby on rails.
Java 9/10, uni course specialises in Java, 3rd year project in java,
developer for OpenSatNav, java again.
C#: 6/10 (lack of much .Net experience), Second year project in C#, as well
as personal interest. Submitted small patches to Tasque, in Mono .Net
PHP, 6/10, used it for some websites a while ago. Submitted a small patch to
Moodle a year ago. A bit rusty now.
Javascript: 7/10, used for most websites I've worked on. I'm familiar with
jQuery and scriptaculous.
C, C++ both around 5/10. A little experience, but nothing special

OSM Project Proposal and Schedule:
My proposal comes in the form of several medium size enhancements to
OpenSatNav. These will take OpenSatNav from a semi-useful tool to a solution
not far from commercial equivalents. I want to work on:
Much more reliable trace recording tools, including voice and picture notes.
This will take about a week, as much of the work is already done by
osmtracker and opensatnav.
Add in support for alternative online routers other than yournavigation.
This will take less than a week, and will allow for the next point:
Turn-by-turn driving directions. This is the larger task, and will bring it
much closer to the standard set by AndNav and other satnav products. This
will include text to speech, using the standard android libraries if using
Android 2.0+, or the TTS download from the marketplace. I estimate that this
will take 3 weeks for the basic visual view, and algorithms to detect moving
off route and moving past a step in the journey, and another 2 weeks to get
the TTS implemented, including intelligent TTS when there are several
instructions close together in a route.
POI search around a place (choose a destination, then search for POIs near
it such as pubs or atms, using the Nominatum geocoder). This will take about
a week.
Finally, there are two features that will be actually innovative:
A widget view, so that someone can leave the application closed, but still
see driving directions in a 2x2 android widget, and thus change music or
other tasks without loosing view of the driving directions. This will take
another week.
Driving directions to the status bar when the application is minimised:
driving directions will be posted as notifications, so even if someone is in
a call, they will still be able to see where to go. This will take about a
week (could be done much more quickly, but will take a week to get perfect)
These together form my proposal, and should approximately fit the length of
the summer of code coding period.

A couple of people have mentioned to me the strain on battery life when
using OpenSatNav. This is something I will continue to work on outside of
the GSoC proposal, as it is a more ongoing effort than a verifiable project,
and is something I'm going to look at before this summer. Other suggestions
will of course be welcomed.

Currently involved in:
I'm an Android developer by hobby and a developer for OpenSatNav (not quite
yet released, but many people are using the development releases we
publish). I have been mostly working on the trace recording tools, which
then can upload directly to OSM without plugging the phone in anywhere. I
gain a great deal of satisfaction when I see people actually using something
I have worked upon, so you can be sure that if I am accepted for GSoC 2010
that I won't just complete the summer and drop something into SVN.

My 3rd year project is an Augmented Reality Satnav that uses OSM (and the
freemap api tile server currently) and that runs on Android. It's not quite
finished yet, but hopefully will be integrated into OpenSatNav.

I'm also a OpenSatNav data contributor, and have worked on some rivers,
paths near rivers, Wokingham (a town in Berkshire), Warwick University, and
Leamington Spa (a town in Warwickshire)

Handling situations:
I work well when self-governed by defined deliverables and targets, and when
I think something is going to be used by other people. The project manager
for OpenSatNav is another potential mentor - while unable to code himself,
puts a good deal of work into project co-ordination.
Through my experience of working on other projects I know how to solve
problems myself, and know how to look things up to expand my knowledge.

Hobbies/Interests:
I'm a keen whitewater kayaker and do alot of that in the colder months (in
summer the UK dries up and kayaking season stops). I'm the secretary of the
canoe club at the university, and also help manage the website. OSM is
another interest - I prefer outdoor mapping using OpenSatNav but have
dabbled a bit with armchair mapping in the snowy months we've had this year.
I'm also into climbing, swimming and cycling, and use these to keep myself
fit.

I enjoy contributing to open source projects and have done a little for
quite a few, spanning a few languages. I'm also a Christadelphian, so am
involved in Church activities from time to time.

Altogether, I hope my proposal shows my huge interest in OpenStreetMap.
OpenSatNav has been something I've put a good deal of work into and I would
love to be able to continue that work full-time this summer. If you do
accept my proposal, you can be assured some very visible results at the end
of the summer!

I'm also putting this on the GSoC/2010 wiki, and very much welcome comments,
requests or critism.

Steve Brown

On 13 March 2010 20:50, Graham Jones <grahamjones139 at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Thanks Steve,
> I look forward to seeing your proposal.  Especially if it is to do with
> opensatnav - I am using that at the moment!
> Seems to eat batteries if you do GPS trace logging, which is a bit of a
> surprise - I suspect it must not be sleeping very much in that loop, but
> haven't checked!
>
> Graham.
>
>
> On 12 March 2010 01:23, steve brown <steve at evolvedlight.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Hey
>>
>> I'd like to say a quick hello! I've been involved with OSM as a data
>> contributor for a while (about a year and a half) and a developer for an
>> Android OSM SatNav for half a year or so.
>> With my background and experience (and love) for OSM I'm hoping to
>> participate this year in google summer of code, hopefully working on further
>> features and versions of the Android application (opensatnav.org). I've
>> seen that last year a participant developed an android client, but it seems
>> to have stagnated in the SVN - I'm quite against just leaving things like
>> that so whatever I do, you can be sure that it'll go live and keep being
>> worked upon. My 3rd year project at Warwick University is also further
>> enhancements to OpenSatNav, so I'm going to be contributing GSOC or not, but
>> if I do get on the programme I will have plenty more time to spend even more
>> good stuff.
>>
>> Anyway, I'll post my proposal up tomorrow after I've worked on it a little
>> more. I've been watching the dev mailing list and the wiki page for a few
>> weeks now, and would like to say a quick thankyou to Graham Jones - it looks
>> like you've put alot of work into the proposal! Hopefully it will pay off
>> and get some quality software developed by people (like me?)
>>
>> Steve
>>
>> 2010/3/11 jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com <jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com>
>>
>>> That is a great idea.
>>> What about making video as well, on how to use OSM/JOSM/Potlatch how to
>>> get started. Video Screencasts?
>>> mike
>>>
>>> On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Peteris Krisjanis <pecisk at gmail.com>wrote:
>>>
>>>> For one of OSM GSoC'10 projects I would like to suggest "unofficial
>>>> guide" for mapping. We all know that there is a little haos in tagging
>>>> (some says it's good, some says it bad), but so far biggest confusion
>>>> comes from not how to tag things, but how to tag complex situations or
>>>> how to even map complex situations (and that's without even taking
>>>> micro mapping into account).
>>>>
>>>> What we need is nice guide where is said - basic roads are maped like
>>>> this, crossroads created this way, this must be connected with that,
>>>> etc. It would also create a nice little base for futher experiments
>>>> and ideas. There's nothing wrong with seeking out alternative tags or
>>>> ways of mapping, but this at least should be documented somewhere.
>>>>
>>>> More or less everyone who would take this task would have to go trough
>>>> all archives, look for discusions and conlusions (and even if there is
>>>> no conlusion, writing down all sane opinions would help greatly) and
>>>> write it down in casual user manual style.
>>>>
>>>> Just a idea, but I think worth to explore,
>>>> cheers,
>>>> Peter.
>>>>
>>>> 2010/3/11 Graham Jones <grahamjones139 at googlemail.com>:
>>>>
>>>> > Mike.
>>>> > Thank you for your suggestion.
>>>> > I do not know where the apache licence ref comes from.  This year's
>>>> > application says GPL with a note saying some is PD.
>>>> >
>>>> > Graham
>>>> >
>>>> > On Mar 11, 2010 7:36 AM, "jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com"
>>>> > <jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>>> >
>>>> > My GSOC  suggestion :
>>>> >
>>>> > Get the potlatch running without any Adobe software, use gnash.
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/GSoC_Project_Ideas_2010#Porting_of_Potlatch_to_use_FLOSS_tools_and_viewer
>>>> >
>>>> > Also why does google list OSM as being apache licensed?
>>>> > http://code.google.com/soc/2008/streetmap/about.html
>>>> > Preferred license: Apache License, 2.0
>>>> > Since when?
>>>> >
>>>> > I am putting all my new code under the affero GPL 3.0.
>>>> >
>>>> > mike
>>>> >
>>>> > On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 4:44 PM, Rajan Vaish <vaish.rajan at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>> >> > Thanks Graham, > >...
>>>> >
>>>> > _______________________________________________
>>>> > talk mailing list
>>>> > talk at openstreetmap.org
>>>> > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> mortigi tempo
>>>> Pēteris Krišjānis
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> dev mailing list
>>> dev at openstreetmap.org
>>> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
>>>
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> dev mailing list
>> dev at openstreetmap.org
>> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Dr. Graham Jones
> Hartlepool, UK
> email: grahamjones139 at gmail.com
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/attachments/20100316/3c0bbbce/attachment.html>


More information about the dev mailing list