Happy New Year and Two New Programs!
Happy New Year and I hope everyone has a great one. I have posted two new free programs are Windows and Linux versions of an older program called Quick Jyotish which has been available for sometime as my Linux program. The difference with the new one is that instead of being built with the Fast Light Toolkit version 2. The old version was built with wxWidgets but was a lot more complicated to program. I like the simplicity of using FLTK2 but for the moment there is no printing available but for quickly looking up charts the program is pretty handy. The FLTK2 group has a high priority of implementing printing which can be a bit diifficult for cross platform libraries especially where they want to keep their API lean.
Under Linux the program seems to work on a variety of distros without any additional libraries installed. However I hope to have both Deb and RPM packages available later for instances where libraries are missing. The Windows version comes with an installer.
An additional reason to use Quick Jyotish is that it uses the same VSOP87 calculation engine that Jyotish Tools for Windows uses allowing more accuracy than Junior Jyotish and a broader date range.
Why my interest in cross platform libraries like FLTK2? Well it takes too much time to learn the seperate APIs for each platform. Astrology programs use minimal graphics and are mainly just text and line drawing. FLTK2 like wxWidgets works on Windows, Linux and the Mac (though I have yet to acquire a Mac to compile the program). More of the library is static so depends on fewer external libraries so it is more compatible. There are also projects to port FLTK2 to Windows Mobile and with PalmSource going to Linux based OS in the future a version for that should be available then.
The result is I can create full products in a short time that can be available for multiple platforms. That's important because unfortunately the small size of the Jyotish astrology market one should not spend too much time on developing Jyotish software or the cost will be prohibitive for the majority of jyotishis.
You can download the new programs here:
http://www.jyotishtools.com/dloads.htm
Under Linux the program seems to work on a variety of distros without any additional libraries installed. However I hope to have both Deb and RPM packages available later for instances where libraries are missing. The Windows version comes with an installer.
An additional reason to use Quick Jyotish is that it uses the same VSOP87 calculation engine that Jyotish Tools for Windows uses allowing more accuracy than Junior Jyotish and a broader date range.
Why my interest in cross platform libraries like FLTK2? Well it takes too much time to learn the seperate APIs for each platform. Astrology programs use minimal graphics and are mainly just text and line drawing. FLTK2 like wxWidgets works on Windows, Linux and the Mac (though I have yet to acquire a Mac to compile the program). More of the library is static so depends on fewer external libraries so it is more compatible. There are also projects to port FLTK2 to Windows Mobile and with PalmSource going to Linux based OS in the future a version for that should be available then.
The result is I can create full products in a short time that can be available for multiple platforms. That's important because unfortunately the small size of the Jyotish astrology market one should not spend too much time on developing Jyotish software or the cost will be prohibitive for the majority of jyotishis.
You can download the new programs here:
http://www.jyotishtools.com/dloads.htm
Comments