Wherigo PC Player?

[LateNighter]

When will there be a Wherigo player for the PC released?

[matejcik]

my guess is never.

 

that, or sometime during this fall or winter i'll do a desktop version of openwig

 

(it's pretty tough to connect to a GPS on a desktop, you know? there is no standardized API, unlike on phones or PPCs)

[YotaCacher]

my guess is never.

 

that, or sometime during this fall or winter i'll do a desktop version of openwig

 

(it's pretty tough to connect to a GPS on a desktop, you know? there is no standardized API, unlike on phones or PPCs)

 

Tough??? I have a laptop w/ DeLorme It consist of map program and a USB reciever.

[matejcik]

(it's pretty tough to connect to a GPS on a desktop, you know? there is no standardized API, unlike on phones or PPCs)

Tough??? I have a laptop w/ DeLorme It consist of map program and a USB reciever.

good for you!

but how exactly is that relevant?

[+sTeamTraen]

I think the OP wants to go out and play Wherigo using a small laptop which has some form of GPS cabability (presumably on the USB port). Two years ago this would not have been very practical, but I can see how you could maybe want to do this today with a netbook, given the improvements in battery life and reduction in prices.

 

I'm guessing that the PocketPC version of the player shouldn't be too hard to port to the PC version of Windows. It would probably be pretty easy to cheat (whatever that means) by having the emulator running in another window, but until Wherigo becomes a competitive sport, "you're only cheating yourself".

[matejcik]

i understand what OP wants, but i'm confused about what trogers wants ;e)

 

i wouldn't worry about cheating with a Wherigo emulator (how do you propose to do it, anyway?). and some people reported success with running the PPC player in a PocketPC emulator.

 

trouble is that there is no standardized API on PCs for communicating with the GPS. linux has gpsd, but last time i remember it was a pain to set up (not as in "hard to do", but as in "you have to do it manually"). Win7 will have something, but nobody knows how will that look like and work.

 

bigger trouble is that there's no standardized API to communicate with bluetooth devices either! there are about four of them on Windows (meaning that some PCs have one and others have the other), and there is something api-like on linux, but it's not exactly pretty either.

 

there is this nice little java library called BlueCove and it claims to hide away those differences, but my results so far are mixed.

 

for comparison:

* porting the PPC player onto iPhone would mean building an iPhonic gui (which i'm told is pretty easy), some glue code, and recompiling the core player functionality.

* porting onto Palm Pre is nearly impossible at this point - as long as you can only use javascript and not C

* porting to BlackBerry (or any other java device) is hard but possible at this point - Groundspeak has a java-based Lua machine (called MochaLua) that behaves exactly like C lua (unlike Kahlua that i'm using, which is operated a tad differently). So they would need to write Java GUI, a lot of glue code (completely new configuration and file access) and "translate" a load of C code into Java. which is not hard but pretty tedious.

* porting to PC means building a GUI (relatively easy), small pieces of glue code, and a metric buttload of new code to handle communication with various types of GPSr's. Which, as hinted before, is hard on a PC.