[Marble-devel] the World Clock plasmoid

[Henry de Valence]

I started tinkering with the world clock plasmoid a bit again, and there are 
two things I'm wondering about:

a) I want to have it able to show a certain area of the world rather than the 
whole thing. Aside from the suggestion of having a combobox which has eg:
	World
	Africa
	Asia
	Europe
	North America
	Oceania
	South America
or something like that, is there a practical way to have the user pick exactly 
what they want to see? 

b) (the tricky one) Using placemarks to show the location of the TZ instead of 
painting it on afterwards.

Doing this makes it easier + it lets the user switch between doing the pretty 
way, where it shows a dot and the time is in nice white letters over the map, 
to the more practical way, which is having each placemark showing its time, 
which lets you see everything immediately.

But, I think that the best way to do this involves direct use of geodata 
objects, because after making the placemarks, I will want to be constantly 
manipulating them. I want to change their visibility and their text, for one, 
and maybe more. I can't use a saved KML file because the timezones I get are 
dependent on the system time zone file.... though the actual zones don't 
change, the locations specified do; does *every* system have the proper TZ data 
for Pacific/Kiritimati ? Right now it uses all the zones it gets with locations 
defined, and this could be different from system to system.

They'll be altered whenever the mouseover changes which zone it's closest to 
or possibly also whenever the time changes.

I would rather use geodata objects because it's easier and there's no mucking 
about with XML generation & parsing every time the mouse moves; I already know 
what I want to be changing about these geodata objects and I know how, and I 
don't like the idea of having to go through two extra, unnecessary steps, 
especially since the plasmoid is already a bit big as is; adding one to the 
desktop takes about a second on my machine.

If there's some other, better way to do this, I'd be interested to know of it, 
but it seems as though doing it that way would be the nicest.

Henry de Valence

P.S.: supposing the plasmoid got to a usable state, could it be added to the 
Marble CMake stuff similar to some of the other edu apps?