Posts tagged racket

This is a Racket GUI Widget which can display maps based on Open Street Map tiles — it allows embedding maps in Racket GUI applications. I originally wrote this code as part of the ActivityLog2 project and, since I wanted to use it in other projects, I decided to move it onto a separate package and publish it to the Racket package server.

I announced my original plot overlay implementation on the Racket Users mailing list and the Racket developers were enthusiastic about these improvements and they suggested that I contribute them to the main plot package. They also suggested a different approach for implementing this feature, which results in more flexibility for implementing overlays.

The Racket plot package produces interactive snip% objects which allow zooming of the plot area. While this is a cool and sometimes useful feature, the functionality is hard coded in the plot-snip% class inside the package. I extended the package to allow the user to customize the interactive features of the plot, to display additional information when the user hovers the mouse over the plot.

To modify one of the Racket built in packages, a local copy of the package has to be set up first. This is a surprisingly complicated task and I spent more time on it than I would like to admit. To save future me and others some time, I wrote up a set of instructions on how to do it.