MMB 2.0 Development Releases
Midnight Mars Browser 2.0 Development Releases
This is the home page for Midnight Mars Browser 2.0 development. Here you can download the latest development version of the software.
Read This Before Proceeding
“Development version” means this software is a work in progress, and probably not ready for a general audience. The intended audience here is people who are already familiar with Midnight Mars Browser and are looking for the very latest improvements, and who don’t mind living on the edge a little bit. If that’s not you, please go back to the main page.
To create a better user interface, MMB2.0 has been rewritten using the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. The panorama feature is rewritten to use OpenGL directly instead of Java 3D. Since it’s a complete rewrite, many of the features in MMB 1.x have still to be moved over to 2.x. This is taking a long time, which is why there will only be development releases for awhile.
If You’re Still Here, Keep Reading:
MMB2.0 requires Java 1.4 or later. If you already have MMB1.x, you already have that.
MMB2.0 does not require Java 3D, nor even want it. So that nuisance has been eliminated. You’re welcome.
Windows and Mac OS X are supported; those are the only platforms I can test on.
512 megs of RAM is the bare minimum required.
Huge amounts of hard drive space is required if you’re going to download many images. We’re talking multiple gigabytes. The rovers have been going for a long time now; there are a lot of images.
- MMB2.0 is compatible with MMB1.x data, so you can go back and use features in MMB1.x - but don't run updates in both simultaneously or you will have image index corruption problems. Shut down one before using the other.
- The first thing you will need to do is run an Update. Select “Get Latest Images from Exploratorium”. In addition to downloading the latest images, this should download the 2.0 image metadata. The metadata formats have totally changed for 2.0; any existing 1.x metadata is ignored. If you do not see any images listed after you have clicked "New View" (in Panorama mode), probably you have no 2.0 metadata yet. If you don’t see a change after updating metadata, try restarting MMB.
- The Navigation keys have changed quite a bit from 1.x; consult the Navigation menu for new commands and keyboard shortcuts. More commands have yet to be added.
- If you are familiar with Eclipse, MMB2.0 will probably make sense to you. If not (and probably you're not), it might not be obvious how it works at first. There are control views and rover views, all within a single window. The control views reflect the status of the topmost rover view. When you make changes in a control view, like changing view settings or selecting a different images, the change is reflected in the rover view, and vice versa.
- One nice shortcut in Eclipse is to double-click a view's title tab to make the view fill the entire window. Double click the title tab again to return to normal size.
- On Mac, the List view for (especially) the image list has a bug where it does not always automatically scroll to the correct position to show your selection. This is a known bug in the Mac version of Eclipse, which I'm not sure how to deal with yet.
- On Mac, it is important to keep the MidnightMarsBrowser application in the same place as its support files and directories. This is not good Mac behavior, but it is how Eclipse works. I'm not sure quite how to get around that yet, either - it will take some work.
- You'll note, amongst other things, that Panorama movement using the keyboard is now smooth, and images are mipmapped to look good and avoid jaggies at a distance. Also, 32-bit color on Mac OS X 10.4 works again. You’re welcome.
- One of the coolest things I've seen with MMB 2.0 is viewing 'movies' of the downsampled Navcam drive images in ground-relative Panorama mode. Just use the bracket keys to step through the panoramas, and the ‘g’ key to center on the closest image when none is visible, and you’ll see the effect pretty quickly.
Download
Make sure you have read the notices above!
Version 2.0 Development Release 10, posted November 22, 2007
