First glimpse…

A lot of the work I’ve done so far has been “under the hood” and tediously dull, so it’s nice to reach a point where things are on the screen.

Here then is a first glimpse at how things are shaping up – click the image below for a view of the entire application window….

Veteran geocachers may recognize the icon design is similar to my “Lordelph’s Lovely Icons” for Memory Map. For Ammotin, I went back to the drawing board and created the icons as vector images, allowing me to render them in different sizes. Zoom out, and they are smaller. Zoom in, and they are bigger and more detailed.

Also pictured is a geocache tooltip, which isn’t finished but approaching what I hoped for. It’s nice to zoom in on area and get a rough idea about a geocache just by hovering the mouse.

The map in the background comes from OpenCycleMap, and is derived from OpenStreetMap data. I’m planning on creating a custom rendering of OpenStreetMap data for Ammotin, but I’ll write more about the mapping in another post. Onwards and upwards!

So what is Ammotin?

Ammotin is intended to be an easy-to-use tool for organising your geocaching and other outdoor activities. I recently switched from Windows to Ubuntu, and found myself wanting something like Memory Map, but optimised for the needs of geocachers.

Development has been underway for several weeks, I’ve been focusing on a number of features for a first alpha preview release:

• Zoomable, scrolling map showing cache locations
• Cache listing with sorting and basic filtering
• Import/export of GPX files

My goal is to make it very simple for a new user, but to have powerful features “under the hood” when you are ready for them.I’m very happy with how it’s turning out too, and I’m “eating my own dog food” by using it to plan my own caching activity while I develop it.

Just to be clear from the outset – this will not be open source, and will not be free, but it will be highly customisable and extensible. Pricing will be announced nearer the final release! It will be available for Linux and Windows, and possible Apple Mac if there’s enough interest and beta testers.

Feedback, feature ideas and beta testers are welcome. Follow the development on this blog, with micro-updates made more frequently on Twitter!

Early days

Welcome to ammotin.com – excuse the dust while I set up something more useful than the fairly cryptic holding page!

Over the coming weeks I’ll update this with more info about what Ammotin is…