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

Mon Aug 20 15:04:14 CEST 2007

On Monday 20 August 2007 14:42:23 Andrew Turner wrote:
> On 8/20/07, Torsten Rahn <torsten.rahn at credativ.de> wrote:
> I believe you've all seen GeoClue:
> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/GeoClue

Well, we've seen it. Afaik the GeoClue project was born during the Boston 
Desktop Summit which happened several months after we had suggested exactly 
the same ideas (interestingly enough down to the same wording being used ;-) 
at our aKademy meeting. Marble (earlier called "Globepedia") was the result 
with the map widget being the part of the framework we have put in most of 
the efforts so far.
From what I have seen there is pretty little code in GeoClue so far (at least 
compared to the 30.000 lines of code that we have invested into Marble so 
far).

What I'd be fairly interested in would be agreeing on common (D-BUS) 
interfaces and stuff that is not related to actual source code. That way 
people could easily choose between Marble and GeoClue as a possible geo 
services provider.

> 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.

At the current early stage of both projects I don't think it's necessary (at 
least not for 0.5 and 0.6 to decide on the backend). I don't exclude that we 
might use GeoClue later on but until stuff has matured I think we can live 
with friendly co-opetition.

Torsten

> 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Marble-devel mailing list
> > Marble-devel at kde.org
> > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/marble-devel

-- 
 Torsten Rahn

 Tel.: 0 21 61 - 46 43 - 192

credativ GmbH, HRB Mönchengladbach 12080
Hohenzollernstr. 133, 41061 Mönchengladbach
Geschäftsführung: Dr. Michael Meskes, Jörg Folz