[kismac] Suggestion for map interface

Michael,

I spent a wonderful week driving and camping through British Columbia's 
southern interior earlier this summer (luckily prior to the horrible 
fires that are sweeping through much of the province), accompanied by 
my iBook, Deluo GPS, and Kismac. Everything performed flawlessly, and 
in my view Kismac has a better implementation of GPS features than 
other shareware or freeware GPS software, even through the mapping is 
an addition to the scanning functions. Congratulations.

After spending 6 days almost continuously running kismac, and changing 
maps quite frequently, I have a few suggestions for the user interface. 
I hope you don't mind me sending them to you, I know that the mapping 
side isn't a priority at present, but when you get around to it...

Interface:

I had thought of a side panel, or floating palette for the maps, but 
then I thought of something much more elegant (and probably easier to 
implement): small triangles at all the sides of the map, just in the 
grey "metal" border. You could have one for N, S, E and West, as well 
as the four corners (NW, SW, NE, SE).

If you clicked on these triangles the software would a) open that map, 
if it knew about the map, or b) open a dialog box to add a map.

Once a map had been added, something would be stored in the .kismap 
file/folder that would indicate which map is where, relative to all the 
others.

Once you had travelled an area once, the clicks would open up the map 
you wanted, immediately. And, in some future version of the software, 
you could have the maps open up automatically, based on current 
location as reported by the GPS.

Tracking:

It would be nice to be able to click on the map and add a "dot" with 
information in it, regardless of the presence of a wireless node. 
Perhaps something that is important to you.

Related to this, it would also be nice to be able to add a "dot" at the 
current location, regardless of your ability to click on the dot. 
Perhaps a key command or something.

I hope these suggestions are useful to you. Keep up the great work.

...r

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