[Marble-devel] Re: Marble for WeTab

[Dennis Nienhüser]

Hi Djuro,

On 28.06.2011 20:27, Djuro Drljaca wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I would like to know what are the possibilities to run Marble on
> WeTab. Marble is already available for WeTab on the WeTab package
> repository, but it is the desktop version and it doesn't work well
> with a touchscreen.

I guess it is the Qt version of Marble. In that case you could start it
with the --smallscreen parameter which will make it run like the N900
version. Possibly this won't be a too good choice, though: The behavior
of Qt on the N900 is quite different to Qt on other systems, so I'd
expect some oddities.

>
> I would like to use Marble on WeTab for offline navigation. from what
> I have read there is a possibility to download maps which can then be
> used in offline mode, but I don't remember if offline routing is
> supported.

The download of offline routing maps should work in either version. To
have offline routing working, you also need the monav routing daemon
(version 0.2 or 0.3) installed. This shouldn't be too hard if you can
compile it somehow. Maybe even one of the binary versions [1] works on
the WeTab.

>
> I would use Marble mostly for (offline) walking navigation (it's too
> big for driving navigation :) and I own a car navigation device).
>
> From what I know about Marble the best solution would be to modify
> Marble for Nokia N900, since it looks like it is optimized for
> touchscreen and low power devices. Probably the UI would only have to
> be resized for a biger screen resolution and maybe change a few
> details, which I could probably do by myself. I programmed a lot in Qt
> for embedded Linux 2 years ago and I try to keep up with the
> development of Qt.
>
> What do you think can be done to create a "WeTab" Marble version?
>

The N900 version of Marble works great on the N900, but it won't be easy
to extend it to other devices in that way. Still we are much interested
in doing that. Therefore we're currently trying to make it easier to
create Marble "applications" optimized for certain device form factors.

Marble today looks like this:

[Marble library]
[Marble KDE application] || [Marble Qt application] || [Marble Qt
application, smallscreen profile]

The vast majority of all code is part of the library, the applications
are rather small. Nevertheless the QWidget based parts don't work too
well on touchscreens and adjustments for different form factors could be
easier. Therefore I'd like future Marble versions to go into this direction:

[Marble library] || [Marble QtDeclarative/Qt-Components/QML support]
[Marble Desktop] || [Marble Maemo] || [Marble MeeGo] || [Marble
Android*] || [Marble Active**] || [Marble Touch]] ...

Each of the applications should be a small .qml application that
combines the common QML/QtDeclarative/Qt-Components into a user
interface optimized for a certain device form factor (and/or use case(s)).

No doubt it will be much work to realize this, but fortunately we
already made some progress: There are first QtDeclarative classes that
export parts of Marble to QML, and sample .qml applications that show
this. I'll work more on that in the future, next thing will be routing
support (such that routes can be configured from .qml applications).
Daniel Marth is working on a Marble .qml application for MeeGo that will
make use of Qt-Components and the existing QML/QtDeclarative bindings.
This is a GSOC project, so expect much progress here soon. Additionally
Niko Sams has started working on an Android port.

Please join us if the above sounds interesting; there are many open
things to work on. A good start might be to get one of the qml examples
running on the WeTab. There's a short introduction to those examples in [2].

Regards,
Dennis

[1] http://code.google.com/p/monav/wiki/Downloads?tm=2
* If QML is available within necessitas, haven't checked
** Plasma Active application
[2] http://edu.kde.org/marble/current_1.0.php