Prune is available to download from the downloads page, with the latest version being version 5. Development of version 6 is under way, and information about the new functions and screengrabs will be shown here as development progresses.
Don't forget, any help with the translations would be very welcome! Please see the translation wiki for details on how to help with this.
Here is the list of enhancements and extra features under investigation for version 6:
The map window has now been reintegrated in the main window, as shown to the right, and is fully zoomable and pannable, draggable with the mouse as before. There's also a tile-cacher which stores the map squares, and they're now being loaded asynchronously to make things smoother. Plus there's a new slider control to adjust the transparency of the map tiles from opaque to very faint. The navigation and keyboard controls, together with a popup menu, have also been reintroduced.
Shown to the left is the new option for povray export - a pair of radio buttons on the export dialog now allows the user to choose either the previous presentation (each data point as a ball on a stick) or an alternative using sphere sweeps and cubic splines (like a tube of toothpaste for the track and a wall down to the base). It takes much longer to render, but the tube looks much better, especially for small numbers of data points. Each track segment now gets its own toothpaste tube and wall (made of semi-transparent polygons). Thanks to Rudolf for the idea and for providing an example pov file for this.
One great addition is the beginnings of the Italian translation set - thanks to josatoc we've now got a full set of the Italian texts for Prune, and these have now been 'backported' to version 5 (see downloads).
There's also a new function like a cut-and-paste for a section of the track. You can now select a range, then select a point at which you want to insert that range, use the menu option "Cut and move selection" and it will move the selected range to before the current track point. Useful for shifting bits of the track around.
Another small enhancement - previously Prune prevented you from assigning two photos to the same point, because each point can only have one photo. Now if you assign a photo to a point which already has one, Prune asks whether to create a new point, and if so makes a copy of the point and attaches it to the new photo.
Plus, there's a new menu command to check for the latest version of Prune - this checks online (if it can) to see what the latest released version number is, and compare it to the currently running version. So you don't have to go to the Prune home page to look for updates (unless you want to!). Note that this function doesn't send any information about you or your data to the server, it just sends the version number of Prune which is doing the checking.
Another cool thing - a direct connection to gpsbabel! This is great, instead of calling gpsbabel from the command line, and saving the waypoints to file, and then calling gpsbabel from the command line again, and saving the track points to file, and then going to Prune and opening the waypoint file, and then opening the track point file, and selecting to 'append', the new way is much easier. Go to File -> Load from GPS, enter the device and format in the dialog (eg usb: and garmin), and everything will be loaded into Prune. Sweet.
The following credits also appear in the "About" screen of the Prune application, but it's worth repeating here - grateful thanks to all those who have helped contribute so far, by whatever means!
| Prune code written by : | activityworkshop.net |
| Exif code written by : | Drew Noakes (drewnoakes.com) |
| Some icons taken from : | Eclipse |
| Translators : | Ramon (ch), Miguel (es), Inés (es), Piotr (pl), Petrovsk (fr), Josatoc (it) |
| Technical feedback : | Piotr, freegeographytools, Rudolf |
| Mac know-how : | Tyme, Daniel |
| Translations helped by : | Open Office, Gpsdrive, Babelfish, Leo, Launchpad |
| Development tools : | Mandriva Linux, Sun Java, Eclipse, Svn, Gimp |
| Other tools : | Garble, Kate, Povray, Exiftool, Inkscape, Google Earth |
| Thanks to : | Friends and loved ones, for encouragement and support |
This is more of a longer-term idea, to see if it would be possible to port the Prune code over to a C++/Qt implementation. That way it would be compiled into native, completely free code, and wouldn't need an extra jre to run. Plus the Mandriva team have offered to package it and maintain it in the official Mandriva repositories, making the download and install just a single command. Which would be very cool.
Of course it's still extremely early days on this, and so far there's only a little basic prototype which doesn't actually do anything yet. A laughably simple screenshot is shown here:
All it really demonstrates is the compilation into a GUI application, basic layout including menus and toolbar, and basic internationalization.