[Marble-devel] Re: Revision 4fd91394

[Bernhard Beschow]

Am Mittwoch, 25. Mai 2011, 17:23:16 schrieb Torsten Rahn:
> >     * keep Spherical the default projection for now, although this should
> >     probably be changed to Mercator in the future
> 
> I disagree with this statement.
> 
> The primary selling point of Marble and its framework is the ability of being 
> able to show off the virtual globe mode (compared to AJAX solutions which 
> already cover the plain map mode quite fine).

I agree with you that Marble's ability for globe projection is a unique selling point, especially since its implementation scales very well without relying on hardware accelleration. I'm therefore neither suggesting to remove the globe projection, nor to make Mercator the default projection for the (educational) Marble applications.

For third-party developers, who just want to show a map widget in their applicatoin, the Mercator projection offers two main advantages: First, many common map themes such as OSM are Mercator-projected and can therefore be made to appear sharp. Second, rendering is super-fast and provides high-quality results in this case, even during animations. So why not have third-party developers benefit from these advantages automatically by making Mercator the default in the library?

-- Bernhard