[Marble-devel] Fwd: Re: [kde-edu]: Marble 0.5: The Road ahead

Mon Aug 20 14:42:23 CEST 2007

On 8/20/07, Torsten Rahn <torsten.rahn at credativ.de> wrote:
>
> Just making sure the marble-devel audience hears about it, too:
>
> > Yes just on the subject on what you forgot about the Gps, we'll need a
> > remodeled ui for the gps tracking thing too. Right now we have gps device
> > geoLocation and also i've just implemented ip. address geoLocation and as
> > of yet we don't have a way to choose between them.

I believe you've all seen GeoClue:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/GeoClue

GeoClue is finishing up what could be called version 1, but so far has
only been packaged (afaik) for Maemo. However, the goal is that it is
platform independent.

The point being, instead of maintaining GPS, IP, and implementing
numerous other geolocation methods - it may be worthwhile to see about
using GeoClue - or at least weighing in about what you would like to
see in it to make it useful to Marble.

Andrew

> > thats it from me
> > Andrew Manson
> >
> > On 20/08/07, Torsten Rahn <torsten.rahn at credativ.de> wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > Now that we (finally!) got Marble 0.4 out of the door, I'd like to offer
> > > my
> > > thoughts on what features should be part of the Marble 0.5 release:
> > >
> > > In my opinion Marble 0.5 should emphasize the work of the Google Summer
> > > of Code students. All features need to get finished for the public (So
> > > the features need to look finished and well integrated into the user
> > > interface,
> > > work as expected and should be easy to use).
> > >
> > > So to get into details:
> > >
> > > * GPS/GPX support: Not too much left as far as I can tell.
> > >
> > > - Make "File View" only appear if a document has been opened and further
> > > fix
> > > the UI.
> > > - Do further tests for GPX file format compliance
> > >
> > > Andrew: Anything I forgot?
> > >
> > > * KML Support:
> > >
> > > From what I have seen the following essential features on Murad's
> > > kml-tasks
> > > list haven't been implemented yet (correct me if I'm wrong):
> > >
> > > 1. Show list view on the left that indicates opened kml/gpx files. List
> > > view
> > > should only appear if there are more than one opened file:
> > >
> > > This is partially done already:
> > > - The "File View" has already been integrated by Andrew for GPX. We need
> > > to
> > > add KML support to it now as well.
> > >
> > > 2. Initial support of KML style objects (icon style, label style)
> > >
> > > The latter is rather unfortunate but I think we can live without it for
> > > the
> > > 0.5 release.
> > >
> > > There are two more show stoppers for 0.5 which are not on the kml-tasks
> > > list:
> > >
> > > 3. Translation of KML files which is pretty much needed for KDE 4. The
> > > idea to
> > > solve this problem was to use Wikipedia's data as an online download and
> > > get
> > > their individual language data of the cities for translation. So a user
> > > who
> > > is from spain would have a database of cities downloaded in the
> > > background which is compiled from the city data from
> > > http://es.wikipedia.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/. That means:
> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/ has the largest amount of cities among all
> > > languages (about 160.000) The data base compiled for spanish would
> > > contain those city names from en.wikipedia.org with the ones that also
> > > exist in http://es.wikipedia.org/ replacing the entries from
> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/ to make sure that they get properly translated.
> > > This is just the rough idea.
> > > I'll take care of compiling the data needed (with input from Tim Alder
> > > from
> > > Wikipedia).
> > >
> > > 4. Country support: For initial very basic country support it would be
> > > nice if
> > > we'd just add countries as "invisible" placemarks (i.e. placemarks with
> > > no symbols). Problems:
> > > - Where do we take the country data from (needs to have a Debian
> > > compliant license)? This isn't too hard to solve though.
> > > - The label for the country names needs to be specially aligned and
> > > layouted
> > > to make it look like a country name. So in opposite to real placemarks
> > > there
> > > will be only a single place tested (instead of 4), the label will have a
> > > larger font, will be center justified and will probably be displayed
> > > semi-transparent.
> > > We need to adjust PlaceMarkPainter to either process the countries as a
> > > different "layer" that gets rendered before the city data (seperate
> > > KMLDocument). Or we need to change it to display city data and country
> > > data
> > > from a single KMLDocument (I'd rather prefer the further).
> > >
> > > Later on (for 0.6) this feature will get extended to make countries to
> > > get "area support" (so the application is aware of each area/shape
> > > covered by
> > > each single country.
> > >
> > > Murad: is there anything I forgot?
> > >
> > > * Flat Map:
> > >
> > > There are three visible bugs in the implementation right now. I'm pretty
> > > sure
> > > all of them can be fixed within the next week. Except for that further
> > > cleaning up and performance optimizations are needed.
> > >
> > > Furthermore there are two features that would be nice to have for the 0.5
> > > release:
> > >
> > > 1. Mercator projection (like Google Maps does)
> > >
> > > 2. Make texturemapper only update newly shown regions and reuse the parts
> > > on
> > > the screen that got rendered already before. This didn't work for
> > > spherical
> > > projection for obvious reasons so right now Marble still renders and
> > > updates
> > > the whole screen for each frame. However this trick would work nicely for
> > > the
> > > flat projection and would make moving around in Marble much smoother and
> > > faster than for the flat projection (in fact as fast as scrolling in
> > > khtml and kpdf).
> > >
> > > The latter would be something that we can live without (however I'd
> > > really like to see it in 0.5).
> > >
> > > Carlos: Is there anything I forgot?
> > >
> > > Also we need to solve the remaining "Known issues" of the 0.4 release no
> > > latter than for 0.5 (Especially: fix the embarrassing Wikipedia browser).
> > >
> > > None of the features we need for Marble 0.5 require further translation
> > > string
> > > changes as far as I can tell (and if there should be a few left then
> > > please
> > > add them before the string freeze on August 26).
> > > We also need to make sure that work on all the features left still gets
> > > started before August 26, so we are still in accordance with the feature
> > > freeze. Except for the country feature I think all of the other essential
> > > features have been worked on to some degree. So that's the only issue
> > > left of
> > > concern.
> > >
> > > Apart from beginning work on country support there is another feature
> > > high on
> > > the wish list: OpenStreetMap support: However I think we should declare
> > > this
> > > feature "optional" for Marble 0.5. It really should need only little work
> > > on
> > > Marble's source code to get this implemented (most work being to setup
> > > the server with the right settings for the tile render software). However
> > > 0.5is meant to focus on the work of the students and I'd like to see
> > > 0.5released within the next 4 weeks.
> > >
> > > So that's my thoughts on Marble 0.5. Are there any things I've been
> > > missing?
> > >
> > > --
> > > Torsten Rahn
> > >
> > > Tel.: 0 21 61 - 46 43 - 192
> > >
> > > credativ GmbH, HRB Mönchengladbach 12080
> > > Hohenzollernstr. 133, 41061 Mönchengladbach
> > > Geschäftsführung: Dr. Michael Meskes, Jörg Folz
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > kde-edu mailing list
> > > kde-edu at mail.kde.org
> > > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-edu
> >
> > --
> >  Torsten Rahn
> >
> >  Tel.: 0 21 61 - 46 43 - 192
> >
> > credativ GmbH, HRB Mönchengladbach 12080
> > Hohenzollernstr. 133, 41061 Mönchengladbach
> > Geschäftsführung: Dr. Michael Meskes, Jörg Folz
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>

-- 
Andrew Turner
ajturner at highearthorbit.com      42.2774N x 83.7611W
http://highearthorbit.com              Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Introduction to Neogeography - http://oreilly.com/catalog/neogeography