I’ve been meaning to release Pyxis for a long time now. It’s a small GPS application for the Mac, ‘dripping with Aqua beauty’, [other apple-like marketing crap here], fully functioning and quite polished, but there are several things that keep me from releasing it.
- While I haven’t found another small app that does GPS the OS X way (they are all either ugly/non-functional or too large and expensive), I don’t think there’s much of a need for it right now as it stands, and,
- I feel that with the pervasiveness of GPS devices and geo-specific functionality in today’s (and tomorrow’s) hardware, it might be better to take a step back and try to see the code from a broader point of view.
Let me explain myself. Seeing how gpsd works on linux/or other *nix platforms, I could rework Pyxis and focus on a GPS daemon for OS X, that will make the GPS unit available to several applications, in a manner similar to the one employed in gpsd, with proper vended objects for other Cocoa apps to call, as well OS X-like configuration of the GPS device, through a System Preferences pane (I already have much of that code in Pyxis anyway). The ‘client’ portion I’ve got, would then just interface with the ‘daemon’, and get the data as would other programs. It would be quite nice and if I get to finish this, I’ll open source it so that others can use and improve the daemon.
I am currently too busy to sit down, design and implement all this, it’s about time I finish my Ph.D, but I’m letting everyone know so that you may comment on whether you think this is useful, whether someone else has already done something like it for the Mac, etc.
I don’t think I’ll ever release Pyxis as a standalone GPS client. Sorry.