libkgeomap

[Michael G. Hansen]

On 03.01.2015 15:09, Tobias Leupold wrote:
>> IMHO, the real question is, shouldn't that pointless wrapper be deprecated
>> in favor of just using Marble directly?
>
> Can marble be used in an identical way as libkgeomap, as a QWidget only
> displaying a map with not only coordinates but also photo thumbnails (grouping
> the coordinates when the zoom factor is too low to display them all etc.), GPX
> tracks and so on?
>
> If so, we (at KPA) should rethink our implementation (but I don't think that
> libkgeomap has been written for no reason ...). But after all, it's a eligible
> question (which surely can be answered by Gilles Caulier and/or Michael
> Hansen).

In the beginning, there was code in digikam that displayed and grouped 
thumbnails of images on Marble, while in kipi-plugins there was a 
KHTML-based viewer for Google Maps, which only showed a marker at the 
position of the photo. Since we wanted both Marble and Google Maps in 
both places, we went the natural way of turning that code into a library 
so that it can be used in both places without duplicating code. 
Originally, we also wanted to show a web-based OpenStreetMap directly 
via KHTML to allow for more interaction with OpenStreetMap's layering 
options, but that option was abandoned because of incompatibilities 
between KHTML and OpenStreetMap's OpenLayer Javascript code at that time.

> Apart from that: If Google's terms of service allow using Google maps like
> libkgeomap does, I think it should be a decision of the user which map he/she
> wants to see.

 From the way I understood the terms of service, yes, this usage is ok. 
We also had a Google Summer of Code student work on the library, and the 
project was not rejected by Google. Of course I would rather see a 
collection of open data satellite imagery to be used instead, but I 
could not find any yet.

Best regards,

Michael Hansen