Sunday, November 28, 2010

open 2sky release

2sky is a full-featured planetarium application for PalmOS devices. It should work on both the newest PalmOS devices (TX, Centro, Treo) as well as older devices as far back as PalmOS 3.1 and maybe even 2.0. Open 2sky supports standard square screens, as well as the extended non-square screens of just about all devices.

Thanks to Kevin S. Polk's generosity in releasing 2sky to me under the GPL, I am happy to announce that 2sky for PalmOS is now officially released, free of charge. Click on "Download" at:
open2sky.sf.net.

I think the interface of 2sky is a model of elegance. The features include:

  • star catalogs up to magnitude 11 (and smaller catalogs for devices with more limited memory)
  • NGC/IC catalog
  • Solar System objects including Sun, moon, planets, Pluto, moons of Jupiter, major asteroids, bright comets, and meteor shower radiants

This release of open 2sky is essentially the same as the last paid release of 2sky (3.0.2), except that I've:

  • updated US/Canada/Mexico daylight savings rules which had changed in the meanwhile
  • refreshed the asteroid and comet databases
  • added support for Handera and Dana Alphasmart non-standard screen sizes
  • removed the white border around the screen on the TX and some other newer devices
  • rewritten code that wasn't GPL-compatible and made the code-base compile with prc-tools rather than Codewarrior
  • added Waco and Turner Research Station to the locations :-)


The resulting binaries are actually slightly smaller than the last paid release.

1 comment: