style/formatting requests

[farotherside]

hey folks,

hello from the farthest northern part of Australia! jeeze, first off I just have to say how much I love this plugin. :) I've been using the 'Dashboard' plugin nonstop since converting over 100% to OpenCPN, so that's like... 20,000nm sailed ago or so? thank you so much for picking up where 'Dashboard' left off!

I have a couple of purely cosmetic requests, if you'd be so kind as to entertain them... I am aware that these are incredibly pedantic and absolutely in no way a priority. it has been my intention for a few years now to just submit a pull request, but going through the source I have to admit my coding chops have atrophied, and there are too many other boat projects pulling my attention. maybe the easiest way is just to ask for them here? maybe these are such small edits that they'd literally take someone more familiar with the source code less than a minute to patch? I see nobody has posted here in a while...

anyway. here's my OpenCPN instance, running on a 22" LED monitor in the cabin of my little Islander 34 'X-Wing':

you can see my main Dashboard is pinned to the right side of my screen. my peeves are, in order:

• COG and STW are left-justified, but SOG is left-justified with an extra space added for some reason. can that extra space be removed, or is it there for a reason?

• COG in the image is shown as 192°. down at the bottom of the dashboard, the 'From Ownship' widget shows the cursor being at a bearing of 109 °. why does the 'From Ownship' have a space between the number and the degree symbol? can this space be removed??

• lastly, and I do wonder if this was a design decision, and if so perhaps you could help me understand it... why are the lat/long positions written as "10 35.590 S" instead of "10°35.590'S"??

thanks very much for all your work on this project!

(ps: my kingdom for "fresh water tank level" and "fuel tank level" widgets... the old 'engine dashboard' plugin used to crash OpenCPN on this Linux box, and I don't know where it's gone now...)

[rgleason]

farotherside
This plugin was developed and tested for accuracy by a very capable programmer. I helped format it to run on many OS and I simply try to maintain it. Quite simply, this is open source, if you want changes made, make them, test them throughly and then make a PR. Dust of those programming genes and help us out.

[rgleason]

BTW there is a much more powerful version that I should get working because it was hampered by the version of wxWidgets that we were using at the time. It does graphs etc.

https://github.com/rgleason/dashboard_tactics_pi

We are using branch mnt1.5.1 the more advanced version is still in my repository, but author
Petri Mäkijärvi has removed his.
https://github.com/rgleason/dashboard_tactics_pi/blob/pr151%2Bmnt151%2Bfe2/docs/developers/README.md

[rgleason]

Well it looks like author Petri Mäkijärvi has removed his github account and all his coding and he has deleted readthedocs documentation, which is unfortunate.

We still have his developmental code 2.0 in the master branch however.
I don't know if it is worthwhile to build this for all OS. There is a version that works for Windows however but it is not built for wxWidgets 3.2.2 and would have to be recompiled.

[farotherside]

ahh, that's sad to hear re: Petri. I'm actively solo-sailing around Australia counter-clockwise right now on a pretty tight schedule (trade winds wait for no man) and cannot depend on unstable/development code, it's just too risky. I don't have the available time to work on software; I'm just in port for two days provisioning for another ten-day offshore passage, and I won't be doing any further software updates until the next port. I can't imagine running a system as critical as OpenCPN on a windows machine, but I guess that's the world we live in.

thanks anyway I guess. I do very much appreciate your work! especially if it was you that added the vertical 'time' indicators to the wind history widget, that was bugging me for a long time. :)

[rgleason]

That was Petri's work in concert with Thomas! It was much need. I wish he had not deleted his whole repos. The development version was incredibly filled with features, using many tools, signalk, node red, etc. Good luck on your journey.