[Marble-devel] Upcoming Release 1.6

[Dennis Nienhüser]

Hi,

Marble 1.6.0 will be released later this year and the various freezes
involved with that are approaching fast:

2012-05-22 Soft feature freeze
2012-06-05 String freeze
2012-06-05 Hard feature freeze

And more, see [1]. If you're still working on something, please make
sure to add it to [0] which effectively moves the deadline to work on it
from soft feature freeze to hard feature freeze.

1.6 will become an outstanding release with several new features
especially on the Desktop:
- dock widgets replace the sidebar
- stars constellations
- navigation tool redesign
- webkit powered info dialog
- redesigned legend (now also webkit powered)
- basic kml editor (will this be ready?)
- license information info box
- major KML read/write improvements
- support for opening KMZ files
and possibly a lot more (I'm happy for feedback for things that should
be mentioned in the changelog).

Please help with testing and polishing the new features. Here's an
incomplete list of things that need work:
- popup dialog position is not always optimal, sometimes hard to close
- initial layout consumes too much space for sidebar
- dock widgets need a toggle action like the sidebar had [2]
- update country information from CIA Factbook 2013 (we are several
years behind now!)
- navigation tool should be easier to reposition on the screen
- KML handlers and writers need to be checked in how far we are near /
have complete KML 2.2 support (+ google extensions)
- newstuff map themes need license information
- legend needs color/space/design polishing
- bin/marble vs bin/marble-qt packaging coordination with distributions
- new GHNS dialog needs testing on windows and mac
- .kmz support in the windows package (compile against quazip)
- file extension (.gpx, .kml, .kmz) registration in the windows installer

Thanks for any help :-)
Dennis

[0] http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.11_Feature_Plan#kdeedu
[1] http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.11_Release_Schedule
[2] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318401