photo credit: Joe Penniston
I’m on vacation today since I planned to do a hiking trip, but the weather turned out to be worse than was forecast, so I decided to stay home. And since I haven’t written any posts for some time, now is a good opportunity to fill you in about what has been happening with Kosmos in the last few months.
The main news is that I’m working hard on a new version of Kosmos. I’ve refactored a lot of the code, cleaned up some stuff I mentioned in the previous post. The “spring cleaning” of code turned out to extend to the summer and (soon) the fall, hopefully it will not extend to the winter (although the winter is the best time to do programming – nothing to do outside, long nights etc… ) 
Looking from the outside the new version will probably not be much different – the only really noticeable difference will be the fact that Kosmos no longer uses DockPanel Suite for tabbed document interface (TDI). The main reason for this is that it is tricky to control the TDI layout programmatically, which makes persisting the user’s choice of layout so that it is restored when Kosmos is restarted difficult. Also, the library is no longer being maintained and I don’t have the time to do it myself.
Instead, I implemented my own TDI framework, which is much simpler, has fewer features and doesn’t look so nice, but it is easier to control. I’m thinking about extending it to support multiple monitors, but since I still have only one monitor at home, this will be difficult to test 
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The main difference with the new version is what the whole “spring cleaning” effort was all about – to streamline the internal design and make it much easier to add new features to Kosmos. My long-term plan is for Kosmos to be a platform for all kinds of applications – an OSM editor, a hiking planner, there are a lot of ideas. We’ll see if my time allows for this. I will also try to extract a GPL map rendering library which could then be used by anyone interested.
Of course, I will also try to fix some bugs that were reported by users.
When I finish the streamlining, the next step will be to migrate Kosmos to the new rendering engine I mentioned I was working on half a year ago. This is where things will start to get more interesting. I’m also thinking about introducing a new rendering rules system (maybe something in the direction of MapCSS). So, lot of ideas, lot of plans…
Anyway, this is all for now – I just wanted to let you know that Kosmos is not dead . Next time I will probably have some screenshots to show.
