KStars To-Do List

• Bug Fixes

  Focus offset on zoom:

  When zooming in, the focus point as drawn somehow becomes offset from the "true" focus point. This results in the user not being able to select an object by right-clicking on it. As soon as enough time passes to cause a coordinate update, the user will notice a relatively large shift in the positions of the objects, after which it behaves normally. I have found that the offset shift is always along right ascension, and that it only occurs when using the "Altitude/Azimuth" coordinate system.

  Getting stuck near the North Celestial Pole:

  It is difficult to "drag" the window past the NCP when in "Altitude/Azimuth" coordinates. The focus seems to get "stuck" near the NCP, and only with difficulty can the use slew past this point. I'm not sure what is cousing this problem. Note also that slewing with the cursor keys seems to work just fine near the NCP.

  Strange slewing at zenith:

  When in "Altitude/Azimuth" coordinates, dragging the window up to the zenith causes the sky to rotate wildly. I'd prefer the more sedate behavior that occurs at the NCP in Equatorial coordinates.

  Phantom Constellation Lines:

  Rarely, a constellation line is drawn from the end of an on-screen constellation to a point off the screen to the upper left.

  Small gap in Horizon:

  There is a very small gap in the Horizon line when in Altitude/Azimuth coordinates. The gap is not visible if the "opaque ground" view option is checked.

  Southern Constellations need Lines:

  Many constellations near the south celestial pole do not have constellation lines.

  Too many layouts in main window?

  With the latest release (0.4 Deneb), I am finally managing the geometry of all widgets with QLayout objects. However, stderr now complains that I am adding 3 Qlayouts to kstars-mainwindow, when it already has a layout manager. I've scoured the code, but I can't see what it's talking about. For one thing, the error messages say that the additional QLayouts are "unnamed", but I have named all of my QLayout objects, and only one of them is managing the main window.

• GUI Improvements

  Splashscreen!

  I've made several attempts to construct a splashscreen. KStars takes several seconds to appear after the user invokes it (because it has to load all of the databases into memory). I thought it would be nice to let the user know what is happening with a progress bar in a splashscreen with informative text (e.g., "reading SAO stellar database", "reading NGC database", etc.). However, my attempts have failed miserably. The closest I have come is getting the frame of the splashscreen drawn, but nothing gets painted in it. Perhaps the splashscreen needs to be a completely separate process invoked with fork() or system(), but then how would I communicate progress updates from KStars to the splashscreen?

  Simplify the color options section of the View options dialog

  It might look less cluttered to get rid of all the buttons for changing colors, and simply make the QFrames that display the colors clickable. The QFrames will have to be bigger to accomodate the text that is currently on the buttons. And you'd have to make sure to change the color of the text so it will always be visible.

  Make the SkyMap resizable

  The KStars window can be resized, but the SkyMap widget does not stretch to match the window size. This is a straightforward change, but will probably requre changing the code in many places.

  Replace KView with custom image viewer

  Currently, when the user displays an image, KView is invoked to display it. This is OK, but the current version of KView does not resize itself to accomodate the displayed image if the image is given as a command line argument (although this is going to be fixed in KDE 2.2). Also, it might be nice to automatically scale down the image if it is very large, which I don't think KView can do.

  Improve rendering of stars

  I currently use the drawEllipse() function to draw stars. It might work better to use scalable bitmaps for the stars (although they'd have to be drawn transparently, which would slow things down). Or we could think about trying to reproduce the real colors of stars, which would be very cool.

• Add Functionality
  • Add Sun, Moon and Planets
  • Add minor planets and comets
  • Allow ephemerides of planetary bodies to be updated from online sources (e.g., JPL)
  • Add Star Names
  • Add contour lines tracing the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds
  • Include Position Angle information for Galaxies
  • Ability to specify the faint limit for various object catalogs, and how the faint limit changes as you zoom
  • Ability to add new URLs to popup menu for any location
  • Ability to add text annotation to popup menu for any location
  • Ability to "track" objects
  • Ability to change the rate that time passes (currently there are only 2 speeds: stop, and 1 sec = 1 sec)
  • Add realistic sky-lighting effects?
  • On-sky thumbnail images of some (bright/large) objects?
  • Add more catalogs? (too many objects may slow KStars down, but we can do tricks like ignoring objects that are outside the viewable area)
  • Add a Detailed Information dialog to the popup menu?
• Miscellaneous
  • Translations
  • Improve Documentation