If Sean is ever to begin receiving daily orders for pallets of 50,000 3G-enabled Freerunners, certain core applications must be attractive, quickly responsive, and absolutely bullet proof. We all know what these applications are: Dialer, Contacts, Meteor Shower Information, SMS Messaging and Calendar. Let's be frank - Meteor Shower Information has long been the weak link in the Freerunner's PIM (Planet Information Management) software suite. This has been, I believe, one of the biggest barriers to mainstream consumer acceptance of the phone. Well no more. A new version of the orrery program (version 2.6) is available which provides several essential pieces of information about meteor showers. It puts YOU, the Freerunner owner, in charge of your nightly meteor watching activities.
Version 2.6: New user features: Added meteor shower information. There is now a page under the "opts" menu which gives information about all meteor showers for the year (the year can be changed with the "time" menu, of course). Things such as the dates of the showers, the maximum rate of meteors per hour, the phase of the moon for each shower's peak and the number of dark hours, are shown. Also shown is the number of dark hours for the next or current night. The "items" menu allows you to specify that meteor radiants for currently active showers should be plotted on the sky display. The radiant position moves against the background stars as the shower progresses. Added a way to change the sky display's center azimuth quickly. Now, if you tap the center of the pan area or press (long tap) anywhere in the pan area, a compass will appear which will allow you to select a new center azimuth with your finger or stylus. When you release pressure on the screen, the display will be redrawn with the selected azimuth at the center. You can still pan in the old way by tapping in the panning area (bottom 1/5 of the screen). Bug Fixes: Fixed a bug which prevented fullscreen mode and flashlights from working under SHR. Fixed nonstandard date display The new version is available here: http://projects.openmoko.org/frs/download.php/778/orrery_2.6_arm_2008.8.ipk I thank the International Meteor Organization (http://www.imo.net/imo/intro) for permission to use their data to produce the meteor shower related displays. _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community