a question about my mapviewer program

[Russell Nelson]

I've been working on a nifty neato GIS application called 'mapviewer'.
Its main purpose is to let you view Terraserver-usa.com map tiles.
Terraserver has a documented interface that lets you fetch 200x200
pixel tiles of UTM maps at varying resolutionas and themes: .25 meters
per pixel for the most detailed color photographs (only in selected
areas), doubling up to 256 meters per pixel.

mapviewer presents those tiles to you as a seamless scrollable UTM
map.  It fetches tiles from a cache or from Terraserver on-demand.
The net effect is a base raster layer which covers an entire UTM zone.

If you're running Fedora, everything you need is already installed.
If anybody wants to give it a try, I'll do a release of the current
code.

Right now, it mostly just displays maps.  However, I'm starting to add
code to edit shapefiles.  I have it displaying a line, which you can
save to a file and load from a file.  You can add a point to the end
of it, and delete that point.


Here's my question: Before I run off a create my own shapefile viewer
and editor, would I do better to 1) create a Terraserver layer for
Thuban, and 2) improve Thuban's layer editor extension?  The reasons
why I might not want to are 1) Thuban depends on a bunch of libraries
whereas mapviewer runs on Fedora without any dependencies, 2) Thuban
uses wxWindows whereas mapviewer uses (and I am more familiar with)
GTK2, and 3) I'm not sure that the Thuban maintainers are interested
in being able to edit layers.

Is ANYBODY else besides myself interested in using Terraserver maps?
In being able to edit layers?

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