Thursday Jun 18, 2009 at 00:00
TPE 0.9.0 released
The Photographer’s Ephemeris v0.9.0 is now available.
Fairly minor changes, but useful ones:
- You can finally resize the window: those of you with large monitors can now make the most of them to really dig into the details of the map area. Thanks for your patience on this one. So long you don’t go larger than 1200px high, you’ll reveal a selection of additional eclectic graphics down the right hand side, courtesy of my wife, Alice.
- If you’re in the Details view and you change the date, the program doesn’t revert back to the multi-day view as it previously did. You can now scroll from day to day and see how the timing of the moon shifts by watching the details graph.
- Finally some minor changes to the About page, including proper credit for the moonrise/set algorithm that is used (thanks to Jeff Conrad for the pointer on this)
I had hoped to have a couple of other features incorporated into this version: (i) correction for height above the local horizon and (ii) altitude (i.e. angle in the astronomical sense) of obstructions above the horizon, such as the mountain between you and the glorious sunset.
While all the maths is working (for the first of these at least), getting the UI right is proving tricky. One of the nice things about the current program is that it requires only two user inputs: a place and a date.
Once you introduce corrections for height above horizon and alitude of objects on the map, the number of inputs, and therefore the complexity for the user immediately increases.
So, I try to ask myself (not, in all honesty, having much of a clue as to the answer): what would Steve do? Haven’t worked it out yet.
As ever, your comments and feedback much appreciated.
Some recent quotations
To end, a handful of recent quotations about TPE:
My all-time favourite(!) from Steev Selby
This is the holy grail of sunrise/set programs
From Wasabi Photo
I am frankly gobsmacked by what this nifty software can do … it is rare that I am in awe by what you can find on the internet for free .. but this is one of those times when I am really blown away.
From Alex Wise down in one of my favourite places, Australia
I’ve seen similar things done in the past but find this much better and think its a must for any landscape photographer.
On EOS-Network
Just occasionally, you find something really useful. If you only found this blog today, then today is your lucky day because this’ll be the second really useful thing you’ve found!
Hola! Witaj! Szervusz!
Finally, hello to visitors from Spain, Poland, Hungary. Looks like TPE has been picked up via a number of sites over in Europe and indeed the majority of traffic over the past few days has been coming from those parts of the world.
I appreciate your linguistic abilities and forbearance with my anglophone application :-)
Posted in Technology TPE
Stephen · Thursday, June 18, 2009, 00:00 · Permalink
RSS/Atom
1
16:01 20 Jun 2009