Options for visualizing marine navigation tracks

mbof commented 1 month ago

Hi, thank you for gpx.studio!

I frequently use it to plot sailing outings (I generate GPX tracks using the project listed here: https://github.com/mbof/hxsync).

My two main suggestions for what would make this better are:

Support for nautical distance and speed units (nautical miles for distance, knots for speed)
Ability to remove elevation from the chart (typically it is just noise, I would just like to see only speed instead)

As a bonus, another thing that would be really neat:

Ability to set color from speed (e.g. gradient from red to green corresponding to speeds from slow to fast)

mbof commented 1 month ago

I may be able to contribute a PR, but before doing so, as suggested in README I wanted to discuss the proposed changes first:

For the first thing, here is what I would propose: adding a "Nautical" option to both the distance and velocity settings

For the second thing, I would propose adding a "mountain" icon to the controls to toggle elevation on/off (default on):

For the third thing, I would propose changing the Appearance dialog to have two options for "Color":

A static color (default)
A drop-down allowing user to pick a value to map to colors (speed, slope, etc.) which would then map min / max of that value over the track to the extents of a gradient

Happy to split this into different bugs if appropriate.

vcoppe commented 4 weeks ago

Speed is in knots and distance in nautical miles, right? I am not against including this, everything is handled in (kilo)meters behind the scenes and it's only the display that is adapted to the user's preferences. If you want to try to implement this yourself, I can give you some pointers to relevant parts of the code if needed.

vcoppe commented 4 weeks ago

I have to think about making the elevation data toggleable. It is technically doable but having it always displayed makes it easy to handle some user interactions. How annoying is it for your specific use case?

vcoppe commented 4 weeks ago

Your third suggestion is similar to #62.

mbof commented 3 weeks ago

Speed is in knots and distance in nautical miles, right? I am not against including this, everything is handled in (kilo)meters behind the scenes and it's only the display that is adapted to the user's preferences. If you want to try to implement this yourself, I can give you some pointers to relevant parts of the code if needed.

OK, I might give this a shot. Thank you.

I have to think about making the elevation data toggleable. It is technically doable but having it always displayed makes it easy to handle some user interactions. How annoying is it for your specific use case?

It's pretty annoying because it makes it more difficult to see what I really want to see (speedup / slowdowns). That said I appreciate that it can be more challenging to show. Is this about the "empty state", i.e. what to show instead of a big blank box if everything is deselected? If so, I could maybe suggest a design for this.

Your third suggestion is similar to https://github.com/gpxstudio/gpx.studio/issues/62.

Yes I noticed that. Besides slope and speed, I have also seen color used to signal elevation for airplane tracks. I think maybe the general feature is about picking a track variable and set color dimension. There may be questions about setting up extents of the range (is it just min/max of the track, or a fixed set for all tracks). Would you prefer to use #62 to track this?

mbof commented 3 weeks ago

I sent https://github.com/gpxstudio/gpx.studio/pull/66 for review at your convenience, for the first suggestion.

For the second suggestion, here's a screen recording of something useful to do with the chart: correlate speed and location on the map to understand where speed was gained and lost. As you can see there is a lot of noise to ignore in that chart because of elevation and slope.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/3de071fe-e9ec-4c98-b429-d72bd8686a4b

vcoppe commented 2 weeks ago

Closing this since:

your first suggestion was integrated (thanks again for your work!),
the third one was suggested in another issue and progress will be tracked there.

Concerning the second one, I think it adds a lot of complexity to the code base for what it is. Having a single dataset used as the main y-axis makes it really simple to handle. Visualizing the slope and surface is also done by coloring this same dataset. Therefore, I am not for adding this at the moment.

mbof commented 2 weeks ago

Sounds good, thanks for considering!

gpxstudio / gpx.studio

Options for visualizing marine navigation tracks #61