[Marble-devel] Marble features

[Dennis Nienhüser]

Hi Emma,

thanks, the snippet is fine on its own. We're already reading/writing
the time information from KML files which would be required to realize
that in Marble. The remaining part therefore is to respect the
information when rendering placemarks. That's pretty simple in a naive
approach (just check if the current timestamp from MarbleClock lies in
the boundary), but given the number of placemarks we have to deal with
might need something more involved.
Last but not least I'd like some redesign of our user interface for
controlling time. That might be less pressing for a 3rd party
application which provides its own logic. We have allocated some time
during Sanjiban's GSoC project to look into stuff like this, so
hopefully we'll make some progress on it soon. The coding period started
just today.

Regarding license fees, there are none. LGPL was chosen as a license to
allow commercial use, and we encourage doing so. Donations to KDE are
appreciated of course :-)
http://www.kde.org/community/donations/

On a totally unrelated note, the KML snippet below is not valid KML in a
strict sense [1]: There must not be spaces in between the values in
coordinates tags, i.e. it should be
<coordinates>4.018378,8.548439,0.0</coordinates>. Just like Google Earth
and possibly other software we work around it in Marble using
heuristics. That's simple for Point coordinates but can become ambiguous
for e.g. LineString ones given that altitude is an optional value. If
you have access to the sources, please change it not to write spaces :-)

Regards,
Dennis

[1] https://developers.google.com/kml/documentation/kmlreference?#point

Am 07.05.2014 15:04, schrieb Emma Clarke:
>
> Hi Dennis,
>
> Unfortunately due to client data confidentiality I can’t send you the
> files but below is a small snippet of the code which handles the timespan:
>
> <Placemarkid="test">
>
> <TimeSpan>
>
> <begin>2014-04-06T01:30:00Z</begin>
>
> <end>2014-04-06T02:30:00Z</end>
>
> </TimeSpan>
>
> <Point>
>
> <coordinates>4.018378, 8.548439, 0.0</coordinates>
>
> </Point>
>
> </Placemark>
>
> Thank you for clarifying the time handling.
>
> Also if the application we developed for business use, utilised the
> Marble API, is there any license fees required? I know this is open
> source but wasn’t sure if this applied to commercial use.
>
> Thanks
>
> Emma
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dennis Nienhüser [mailto:earthwings at gentoo.org]
> Sent: 06 May 2014 20:03
> To: Emma Clarke
> Cc: marble-devel at kde.org
> Subject: Re: [Marble-devel] Marble features
>
> Hi Emma,
>
> Am 05.05.2014 17:07, schrieb Emma Clarke:
>
> >
>
> > Hi,
>
> >
>
> >
>
> >
>
> > I have a question regarding the running of KML files. I have three
>
> > files, locations, items and routes. In Google Earth I can use these
>
> > KML files, to run an animation of the items moving along the routes,
>
> > between the locations, over a number of months. My items utilise the
>
> > TimeSpan. Is this possible in Marble?
>
> >
>
> we have contributed a fair amount of work lately into realizing such
> things. There is a Google Summer of Code project also that just
> started these days which will realize a related use case (animated
> tours). Feel free to share more details about the KML files (ideally
> share some samples if privacy etc. allows), I'm curious about their
> structure.
>
> >
>
> >
>
> > I would also like to be able to toggle the routes, as there are about
>
> > 100 in each file and this is cluttering the map?
>
> >
>
> >
>
> >
>
> > Thanks
>
> >
>
> > Emma
>
> >
>
> >
>
> You can do that from our "Files" panel. In the main menu, "Settings",
> "Panels", "[X] Files". Among other files it will show KML files opened
> by you in a hierarchic view with a checkbox for each item in it to
> toggle whether it is visible.
>
> If your Marble version does not have the "Panels" menu, start it with
> the --enableFileView option to get the "Files" panel.
>
> Regards,
>
> Dennis
>