[kde-edu]: Intent to move Marble into KDE-EDU

[Torsten Rahn]

On Thursday 08 March 2007 22:10:07 Anne-Marie Mahfouf wrote:
> It needs intense KDEification before going to kdereview (menubar, i18n
> being the most important, doc,...).

This "intense" KDEification is really a small amount of work compared to what 
has gone into the actual widget already. But as I said before that's 
something I'll surely address before moving it into kdereview, of course :-)

> I'd like to be able to choose some settings to be able to do more:
> - be able to the countries borders in thicker painter so for example
> looking at Europe a kid will see better the countries

I'm currently not quite satisfied with the borders myself (The ideal solution 
I'd like to see is unfortunately not possible to draw using Qt 4.2). However 
that's the beauty of using vectors: You can create a theme for a politcal map 
which would for example completely remove the topography/relief and have 
colorful filled countries with strong black borders instead. Focusing on 
country display is currently targeted for April in my schedule.   

> - have a mode with Capital tows only (not too many informations)

If you look closely at the map you might see that capitals get underlined 
already. A trivial change would be needed to have capitals displayed only.
The biggest challenge is really to get the concept of the UI right (not the 
coding which is rather easy) as I'd like to keep it as intuitive and simple 
as possible.

> another mode with rivers only, one with mountains only. Is it possible 
> to have the capital for each country?

Yes. All of this could be fairly easy accomplished due to the usage of 
vectormaps. What is also missing is country names and (less important) river 
names being displayed. I hope to be able to resolve that during April.

> - navigation with keys does not work very well (if I zoom I can
> not then move and vice versa) seems to be because of the tooltips.

Not sure what you mean. Keyboard navigation works fine as long as you do it 
exclusively (i.e. navigating via cursor keys and zooming via +/-). What you 
probably mean is the focus issue that isn't trivial to solve: if you switch 
between the usage of the control buttons/sliders on the left and between 
keyboard navigation you'll experience the problem that once you use the 
toolbox on the left the toolbox will have the focus and you need to change 
the focus to the Marblewidget to be able to make use of the navigation 
keyboard shortcuts. Getting that right is possible but requires some changes 
that I expect to be slightly tricky. Any patches to solve this issue are 
appreciated ;-)

> - the tooltips don't display smoothly (I see black)

Didn't focus on that yet as I wasn't aware that this happens. I'll have a look 
at it and fix it if possible. Thanks for pointing it out.

> - will Wikipedia work in the most possible languages?

Yes.

> - measure does not seem to work (it said 10 m between Berlin and Paris)

I haven't finished it yet and only committed it today because I was in a 
hurry. It's probably about 2-4 days away from completion. But it's nice to 
see that you found it already although it's a bit hidden as right now the rmb 
menu is the only way to add measure points.

Actually I bought and downloaded several encyclopedias and Virtual Globes 
available for Windows as well as Linux during the last few months to see how 
they solve issues (most if not alll encyclopedias ship with an own virtual 
globe of some kind). The "Measure-Tool" is one of the more complicated things 
to get right from a usability point of view:
Some applications offer different modes to let the user measure, get info, 
navigate and zoom. Those modes need to be selected via push buttons. Usually 
such modes should be avoided if possible according to usability: They add 
lots of additional buttons and a behaviour that isn't really transparent or 
obvious for most people.
There are a lot of other aspects in which the measure feature varies from 
application to application and I'll try to combine what I consider the best 
solutions for a casual user.

> - the flags can maybe be used by other programs

True. We should try to sort that out before the kdelibs freeze. The flags are 
public domain SVG's downloaded via a python script (not during runtime but at 
the time of development) from Wikipedia. Some Wikipedia contributors seem to 
have put some additional work into the flags available on openclipart which 
results in much better colors and better and more flags. I also created some 
script to remove redundant data from the flags to allow for better 
compression in the tarball (like reducing precision from 8 decimals to 3 
decimals behind the comma for the curve nodes. 8 decimals practically don't 
make sense as they'd only show visibly changed precision as soon as you 
disply the flags at the size of several _meters_.

> Regards,

Thanks a lot for your feedback :-)

Torsten

> Anne-Marie
>
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