<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/><title></title></head><body><p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">Hello Marbleheads,</span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">there have been a few notable additions made in the Marble master development branch recently:</span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">- Application developers using Marble should take note that tile downloads now communicate the executable name/application name as part of the user agent string:</span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">Previously the user agent string had been:</span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Marble/23.7.70; DesktopDevice; Browser; QNamNetworkPlugin)"<br /></span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">Since yesterday this has changed to include the executable name (or application name). E.g. for the application "LittleNavmap" which is using the Marble library the user agent should now become: </span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Marble/23.7.70; DesktopDevice; Browser; QNamNetworkPlugin; <em>littlenavmap</em>.<em>exe</em>)"<br /></span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">This helps us to get a better awareness about causes for tile downloads on our servers. But no worries: there are no problems with tile usage on servers right now.</span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">- The DownloadRegionDialog class is now able to also handle vector tiles of the Marble Vector OSM map theme. This means that it's now possible to bulk-download Marble's vector tiles in advance for Offline usage (limited to at max. 100000 tiles, please avoid such high-volume downloads!). For map themes that include both a vector layer and a texture layer it's now possible to choose between them.</span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">- The Clouds cover for the Blue Marble Satellite View had been orphaned since XPlanet discontinued the free download of the global cloud layer (around 2016 IIRC).</span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">Since yesterday we got a new "cloud provider" (in the water vapor sense"): SSEC RealEarth, UW-Madison has a WMS service which allows us to pull the needed data.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">Oddly this seems to be the only source on the internet to provide such data free of charge. And the most embarassing thing was that this change only required a single line of code (plus the addition of the cronjob). </span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">- WMS Support: As you might know it's possible to display the data from WMS-Servers in Marble. "File -> Create New Map" allows you to create a map theme based on arbitrary WMS services. I made a few minor improvements that hopefully make this use case more enjoyable. One of the next additions might be a selection for the tile projection, further improvements regarding license/service terms and possibly selection of a background color if this capability is supported.</span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">In order to port Marble to Qt 6 I will soon perform the following step:</span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">- Get rid of support for all Qt versions <= 5.15: This means that all defines and APIs that are deprecated for 5.15 will be removed.</span><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none"> </span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">If there are any concers with this step, please provide feedback!</span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">That's all for now!</span></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">Best regards</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">Torsten<br /> </span></p>
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