Future Improvements
The planetarium application which has been developped here is not a stable release.
The current version of the planetarium is working and usable but features are quite
limited, extensive maintanance is needed and space consumption is very high. Therefore
there are many suggestions for further improvements and where to go from here. The
most important points are now to be mentioned categorized by the section or component
of the planetarium they belong to.
For each component, the so called "short term" list contains improvements which
are meant to improve the usability of the planetarium or improve automatization
of certain maintanace tasks but hardly add new functionality. The "long term" list
shows up conceptual improvements to the design of the planetarium which in most
cases would require a notable amount of programming and development to be realized.
These suggestions are meant to enhance the planetariums functionality and make it
more powerful application.
Improvements for Star Chart Tile Image Generation and Serving
Short Term
- Re-introduce the code for displaying text on the star chart.
This code is present in the original version of Mobile Star Chart but has been dropped
while porting the application to J2SE for compatibility problems. Doing this would
allow to display star / object names and in the charts.
- Add command line options to the application.
At the moment, all options (i.e. the time and location, zoom levels, output path,
timespan, ...) for generating the star charts need to be changed in the source code
which requires the program to be recompiled every time. For simpler usage and easier
automation, the application receive all these options as command line parameters.
- Improve the database access code.
The applications will ouput hundreds of thousand pixel mapping entries to the database
while creating tiles. The current implementation for this is quite slow. As this
part is very time consuming, tile generation would be a lot faster if this code
was improved.
- Improve the output quality.
Currently using the standard JAVA librarues for PNG output, the quality of the star
charts in the created images is somewhat worse than for the screen output. This
point certainly could be improved.
- Output mapping information to the database not only for stars but also the Messier
objects included in Mobile Star Chart. Soo Messier objects could also be clicked
in the planetarium.
- Increase the size for drawing stars depending on the current zoom level for which
the tiles are generated.
Long Term / Conceptual
- Adapt the tile generator appliaction to function as a JSP Servlet / Java Bean that
accepts zoom level and x and y coordinates as input and directly renders the according
tile to memory and serves it over HTTP. One could call this a tile server. This
way we wouldn't have to spend days creating images for a single location and a single
day that use up gigabytes of disc space but could give the user the freedom to select
any place on earth at any given time and view the according star chart. With an
increasing number of users this would of course require quite a powerful server
and performance and feasability of this solution is yet to be investigated but it
would significantly increase the flexibility of the application.
- Try to use another tool for the star chart generation to obtain higher quality images.
Althought this is somewhat contradictory with the point just mentioned, one could
try to retrieve the tile images from programs like Stellarium or Starry Night as
they have a much better look and feel. Mobile Star Chart, the current solution,
is a tool intended for mobile device and thus pretty much optimized for speed and
size but most certainly not for output quality.
User Interface, Usability and Functional Improvements
Short Term
- Display the current time and date (server time!) on the screen.
- Display the time left till the next refresh of the view.
- Add functionality for zoom in / out on double click with the left / right mouse
button.
- Display a well formatted and smooth popup window when hovering a star which contains
the most important details about it.
- Display all details about a star in a clearly structure and handy dialog window
when clicking a star.
- Center the view on a star on double click on that star.
Long Term / Conceptual
- Add the posibility to click on a star and make the telescope in Ciclope Astro move
to that star.
- Give the user the posibility to control the loation and time for which to display
the star chart (in combination with the tile server mentionend in the section above).
- Add toolbars and buttons with functionality to take a screenshot, control the elevation
and direction of the view, filter the objects to display, control the update speed
and switch to fullscreen and back. (Most of these things would probably require
the tile server solution instead of pre-created tiles.)
- Add client-side code to display the planets on the star chart. Especially for greater
zoom levels, they are moving to fast to be served by a tile sever. The chart would
have to be updated every seconde or so. As the number of planets is quite small,
eight by now, client-side JavaScript shouldn't have much problems to calculate their
positions every second and position an overlay of a planet images on the star chart
at the correct location. Sun and Moon might be added, too.
