34 replies to this topic

[C. Thieullet]

Hello,

The first Free Astromist Beta version for Pocket PC is available at http://www.astromist.com

The set of functionalities is equivalent to the next 2.4 on palm except some minor functions that are not yet included (CheckList, Rambaut and King polar alignment methods).

Documentation is under progress but 2.3 Palm one can be reused because look and feel are very close.

About the requirements:
- 10Mb of free memory (full version requires a memory card)
- Windows Mobile 2003 or greater.
- No need of .Net
- At least a 240x320 display and a 200MHZ CPU.
- 480x640 displays as well as landscape mode are supported.

Feel free to send me feedbacks/bugs reports at bugpocket@astromist.com I will do my best to improve and fix them !

Best regards,
Cyrille

[Thomas Pfleger]

Hi Cyrille,

I downloaded and installed the beta yesterday evening. Setting up on a T-Mobile MDA III was a snap. As a seasoned user of the AM Palm version, I felt familiar immediately.

You have crafted an awesome application! Everything ran smoothly, but then out of the blue I got a hang that required a soft reset. I'm going to test further, trying to reproduce this.

Next tests will deal with a Bluetooth connection to my Sky Commander DSCs. The night mode doesn't suffer from the Palm's "bright margin dicease", the speed is much higher than on my Tungsten E2 and so PPC+AM+BT might prove as a lightweight substitute for a notebook if one quickly grabs the gear and rushes to observing without long preparation.

One question arises: you know Eye&Telescope and provided the source code to write a favorite object list in the form of a Palm DB. What format will the PPC version of AM support for importing object lists? I'm currently working on an update for Eye&Telescope and it's still early enough to incorporate a custom export function for AM on PPC. I'm sure that the users of AM and E&T will like that!

You know already what I'm still missing: the XML compliance ;-) Work on a web application to enter and browse observations is ongoing (conducted by our fellows from Belgium). A new XML Schema version is due, taking optical filters and language tags into account (you state what language a description in the log is in and this will help foreign readers to sort out what they want to see because of their language skills).

As soon as E&T 2.8 is out and the schema is released I will provide you with the new stuff.

Best regards,
Tom

[C. Thieullet]

Hi Tom,

Happy to know you are on board for the beta test ;-)

Let me know for the hang if you can. I fixed the most I can find but I suppose few are still there. There is no "Gremlins mode" for Pocket PC Simulator (like on Palm one) so it is not easy to hunt them.

Bluetooth is/should be locked in the beta version but be sure Astromist run smooth using bluetooth with Sky Commander. I tested with mine ;-).

Observation log export will be far simple now because I can write in folder not in database. So XML will come just: let me some time to hunt the last bugs and release the package :-)

At last the export format for Pocket Astromist Databases has changed. I need to post you the new code for E&T 2.8 ;-)

Best regards,
Cyrille

[Darren Bly]

OH MAM!!! I'll have it on my X51v so soon as I get home from work

Thanks
Darren in Bakersfield

[PEterW]

Axim X51V, I once tried Astrommist on a black&white Palm.... looked good then. Lets see what it can do in colour with more oommph behind it!

Cheers

PeterW

[PEterW]

Seamless. Plenty under the hood. Easy to navigate without knowing how it works. No crashes, no obvious bugs either! Plenty more that could go in too. Looking like a very nice easy to use prog.

Cheers

PEterW

[C. Thieullet]

Peter,

Many thanks for your feedback and your time spent to test.

Cheers,
Cyrille

[Thomas Pfleger]

Hi Cyrille,

It would be nice to get your updated PDB writing code. Just mail it, it will be assimilated ;-) I will keep an old format export, of course. When comes the change: from 2.3 to 2.4?

Some small inconsistencies I noticed until now:

* The lunar crescent is plotted in up/down direction, despite of the oblique view in the sky.

* When showing a map facing to west, Venus was not plotted despite it was above the horizon. Somewhere seems to be a "low altitude suppression" criterion that absorbed Venus. Using the Object Finder, it was found and plotted but after shifting the map it vanished again.

* I had a map showing NGC 1502, an OC in Cam (next to Kembles Cascade, a nice binocular and RFT target). I looked up NGC 1501 using the Finder, it was displayed on the map but after panning it was gone again, because the magnitude criterion in the Zoom Settings demanded this. So it's not a bug, but IMO an object should stay on the map if it was selected "intentionally" before. I'm not sure, however, whether anybody would prefer this behaviour, but to me "vanishing" seemed simply impractical.

* Somehow a the mirror reversed map turned to normal, upright orientation after I did something (don't know what, too sad!) that shouldn't affect the orientation setting.

I'll try to reproduce the crash mentioned before.

What about the memo format? Is it the same for PPC and Palm? If so, I suppose it can be found in the doc.

Bluetooth/SkyCommander: great, I'm really looking forward to this.

XML: I'm happy that you will address this! The real challenge will IMO be a good interface. The objective should be to describe as much detail of an observation as possible with just point and tap. I assume that nobody wants to acquire lenghty textual descriptions with cold fingers and without a keyboard. My T-Mobile MDA even has a keyboard, but it has a blue backlight - useless for astronomy while dazzling. So even E&T (which normally runs on computers with a "true" keyboard) will come with some new descriptive elements in the log allowing for "selecting instead of writing": colors of double stars and some OC "appearance descriptions" in form of simple, yet effective codes. The actual description might be captured with a voice recorder for later (at home, in bright light) acquisition as text. You will see this in E&T 2.8, but I'll take my time, too.

To avoid log interface cluttering, I suggest organizing the controls of the log on a common area and some object type specific registers (aka property pages).

I think that XML import is not really necessary. There are good free (look for "Observation Manager" on SourceForge) and commercial tools for dealing with the XML format and browsing tons of observations is not what you typically do under the stars. If someone wants to carry along his/her observations, a tool can create an HTML list for viewing "on the road".

Take your time, the priority should not be on new features if existing features are yet less than complete.

Regards,
Tom

[C. Thieullet]

Hi Tom,

I sent you the code for the pdb ;-)

About the small inconsistencies:
- Moon needs work to be rotated very fast and still keep good display quality. I made but removed in skychart: worse quality.
- Venus filtering: I will check but the filtered is really close to 0.
- I fixed point 3 and 4.

Memo format (text) remains the same.

We will have time to discuss arround the XML :-)

Cheers,
Cyrille

[John Jarosz]

Just found this thread and announcement. I downloaded the beta and have it running on my Toshiba e750. No crashes yet. Very slick starchart graphics.

What is the schedule for the full version? Release date?

Nicely done!

John

[C. Thieullet]

Thanks John :-)

I will release as soon as I can.
Some test are in progress with Telescope (SkyCommander, LX200 and Takahashi). I already made Celestron.
Documentation in under progress too.

When all feedbacks will be green I will release.

May be this week-end or next one.

Cyrille

[Tom T]

This is going to make me dust off my pocket PC.

I wish you were porting this to Maemo. (Debian variant.) I have a nokia 800 that's totally replaced my PDA's except in this one little area.

[PEterW]

I nearly bought a palm a few years back to run this.... bought a PPC as a nice gadget... and what do you know.... Astromist comes along to satify my needs. Beats everything else out there and then some. Anyone not have a Pocket PC.... get saving now!

Cheers

PEterW

[Auditor_Kevin]

Hey All,

Can someone give me a hand installing this? The program looks sweet but the install and readmefirst files are woahfully inadaquate for someone of my caliber (just bought my first pocket PC, an XV6700 running WM5).

I've downloaded the zipped file, unzipped it, tried to run it and got a "not a valid WIN32 application". Then when I copy the unzipped folders and .exe file over to my phone and double click the .exe it doesn't even give me the option to run it.

I'm at my wits end here. I've installed half a dozen other things on my phone using .cab files and activesync but this one is just a big frustrating mystery. Thanks in advance for the advice.

Kevin

[Auditor_Kevin]

Nevermind! Just figured it out and it's working great. Thanks to all those involved so far!

[half meter]

I can't wait to load it onto my Axim X51v fast (133x) 4GB SD flash card.

[PEterW]

4GB..... *censored* you'll have to ask Cyrille to provide the entire USNO star catalogue and then some to help you fill that up. The Axim runs the prog nice and sweetly.

PEterW

[Darren Bly]

I have it running on my X51v with a 133x 2gb sd card and it's sweeeettt!

[half meter]

Great to hear! I have the entire USNO star catalog -- can I really import it into Astromist ?

[C. Thieullet]

Hello,

Thanks for your feedback :-)

I am afraid USNO is too big for the moment but Astromist provides Tycho catalog (2.5 M of stars up to mag 13).

I just posted 2.4.3 which fixed 2 new discovered crashes: one using the observer log and an other due to memory leak/corruption after playing a lot with screen like comet, satellite, location, compass.
I still have an issue if a user plays to power on/off his/her PDA several time when Astromist is open. Sometime Astromist quit (bad closing of databases).
I think it is the last beta before release...next week-end.

Cyrille

[PEterW]

The beta phase now appears to be over, there is now a much improved trial version on the website and you can now buy a full copy if find it useful.

Cheers

PEterW

[NHRob]

Dumb question ...
What basic device would people recommend for running Astromist??
I'm just getting into the whole ppc/pda thing.

Also, what the diff. between a ppc and Palm?

Rob

[esdras]

Hello,

Well I try and try hard.

At the site of Astromist in a Pocket PC I went and got a Dell Axim X5 it has Pocket 2002. Astromist requires Pocket 2003 at least.
My options are to get a Palm T/X ore a Dell Axim X51v.

A friend of my just got a Dell Axim X51 and let me try the demo version of Astromist , I install it on a SD card and lunched Astromist and it came up I was very exciting. At this point we tried to open any of the applications and it lock up nothing was working .My friend was very patient we try it at lest 6 times each time we have to reset the Axim X51 because it lock up.

I have a CGE 11 and hope some day I can interface with a handhelds.

I am leaning toward the Palm T/X

Esdras

[Doc]

I am impressed. It works perfectly and smoothly on my Hp hx4700
this should do well. Thanks.

[Vicchio]

I've a 2.4.4 registered version, I like very much this prgogram that is going to be my all-around favourite Astro-program.

I've to ask some question (bugs?):

why every two or three times that I use the program, the program don't start any longer until I soft-reset the PDA?

and why the "daylight" option in "location" settings don't has effect also if checked, and every time I return to the location page this option is unchecked?

Temporarily I've set the GMT(min) to 120 instead of the correct value of 60, but every time that I've to soft-reset the PDA the GMT value come back to 60, it's an annoying waste of time...

I've installed Astromist on the 1gb SD storage card of my Axim X3.

There isn't an Italian translatiuon of the 2.4 version User Guide? I'm using the 2.3 version but is quite different...