Jan, the GPS software is great, and very useful. I'm quite impressed! I've been playing with it since last night.

It wouldn't be an empeg project without feature requests, though, so here's my pie-in-the-sky wish list.


- My GPS unit is notorious for taking a long time to lock onto satellites and start being useful. Often, it takes 5 minutes between the time I start the GPS application and the time that it's actually able to track my movement. So what I'm wondering is if, at player boot up time, when the GPS app is first called by preinit, it could at that time send the command to activate the GPS unit and start its initialization. So that way, later, when I finally do go into the GPS application, the sats will be there when I come into the menu. This could, of course, be optionally disabled for those whose GPS units are solely battery powered. By the same token, I would like to make sure that the unit stays on in the background even when I exit the GPS software. I think it has a timeout of 90 seconds where if you don't talk to it for that long, it will shut itself down. So I think your software has to actively be there doing something, however small, the whole time. Not sure how that works on these things, though. (Note: It seems to already do this, at least the part about keeping the GPS active after I exit the GPSapp. Does it? I exited the GPS software for a few minutes, then went back in, and the satellites were still there.)

- I would like to see the software always count down to the next turn on the map screen, with the actual text of the next turn up on the screen. Right now there is the option of a "popup", but I spent a lot of time last night staring at a map screen with no text, despite toggling the popup feature on and off. I would come up to turns and it didn't pop up and tell me the turn. I'd rather just have the current turn's text be on the screen 100 percent of the time.

- Better indication of toggle states. For instance, a lot of the menu items are toggles, but I have no idea if I'm toggling them on or off. Popups, for instance.

- It seems like the right-hand side of the map screen is a distance to the final destination, a direction to the final destination, and a distance to the next turn. (Not sure). I would much rather see it be (optionally), a distance to next turn (large), estimated TIME to next turn (smaller), and current speed/altitude. No arrow.

- In the all-text screen, I'd like to see the left and right buttons do something useful, like scroll through the list of turns in addition to the knob as it does know.

- I'd like to see the knob be able to be volume control for music player software even when still inside the GPS software. Is that possible?

- The short knob press should do something useful in the GPS software (doesn't seem to do anything at the moment). Perhaps it could be used to toggle between player track/volume controls and the GPS software controls. That way you could at least switch tracks and adjust the volume without exiting the GPS software.

- When you hold down the bottom button, it does not offer immediate feedback when switching screens. You have to release the held button to make the screen switch. This is opposite of how the other button hold features work on the player, which will switch the screen or feature as soon as the button was held long enough to activate that feature. Although both behaviors have a certain user interface validity, I think the GPS software should be consistent with the rest of the player in this regard.

- I'd like to have the ability to set default program startup options such as rubber band off, coordinates off, etc. That way, I don't have to set them every time I start the GPS app. It's OK if these have to go into config.ini or some other place, no need to use flash RAM for this.

- Corrolary: I'd like the ability to remove menu items completely. For instance, if I always like the rubberband off, the coordinates off, and always want it to be miles instead of clicks, then I would like to remove those selections from the menu so I don't have to scroll through them when I'm in the menu.

- Bugfix needed: Blinky satellite data screen as illustrated in the animated GIF file in my other thread.

- Bugfix needed: Sometimes keystrokes in the GPS app get through to the player software. Case in point: More than once, pressing the right button on the faceplate began to fast forward the current song and it did not stop fast forwarding until I exited the software back to the player and pressed the button again. Not sure how to force this to happen, it's intermittent. Seems to happen more easily if you are in the GPS software, then you exit the GPS software, then you go back into it. I got it to happen just now by doing that.

- The menu selection box looks the same as the "No Satellite Data" box and is in the same place on the screen. So it looks strange atop the "No Satellite Data" box. Perhaps the menu should be up higher on the screen and/or a different style than center-screen message box. Or vice versa.

- The message "Waiting for GPS Location". Should it be something like "Waiting for data from GPS receiver" instead? And the "No Satellite Data" message, perhaps it should be "Receiver found, looking for satellites" or something like that. This would have prevented my initial installation confusion, not knowing whether the GPS unit and serial cable were working or not.

- Can the actual NMEA sentences be scrolled in a small window on the satellite data screen? I saw a Palm app which did this, and it was very useful in determining that the GPS unit was working even before it got a satellite lock.