Marble Maps 1.1 Release Testing

[Dennis Nienhüser]

Hi there,

I'm currently preparing another release of Marble Maps for Android. The 
current version was released on December 11th, 2016. Changes since then 
include

- public transport routes can be highlighted (use the toggle in the new 
side panel)
- many more features shown in the map, among them winter sports (piste 
maps, skitours, nordic trails, ski jump, ...)
- bugfixes and speed improvements
- now using Qt 5.8 as a base

While it works fine on my two devices, I'd appreciate more tests on 
other Android systems. You can get todays version in our alpha channel 
[1] after joining the alpha testers group [2]. Alternatively, there's a 
direct APK download at [3]. Some screenshots of public transport are in 
[4].

The alpha version downloads vector tiles from a different location than 
the stable one. They include the new features, but do not cover the same 
area as the stable ones so far. At this point Germany is fully available 
(i.e. tile levels 11/13/15/17), the alps (for winter sports, also full 
detail) will follow in some days. Tile levels 0/1/3/5/7/9 are there 
worldwide, levels 11/13 will follow in the next days. Selected 300 
cities in tile leves 15/17 will follow soon as well. At that point it 
should be possible to have the new tiles replace the current ones 
assuming compatibility testing is successful.

In order to support public transport routes I generalized the OSM 
relation extraction from multipolygons to arbitrary relations. So far 
there is no filtering of relations in order to facilitate implementing 
other features that make use of relations. However this comes at the 
price of some 20% larger tile size in average, and a slower tile 
creation process. On the positive side this means we also know about 
other types of routes already, e.g. road routes like the international 
E-road network, permanently signed detour routes, walking and hiking 
routes, bicycle and mountainbike routes, inline skating routes, horse 
routes, ... You can highlight them case by case when tapping on a map 
feature such a route runs across. A better user interface for that 
should be ready for the next but one feature release.

Regards,
Dennis

[1] https://play.google.com/apps/testing/org.kde.marble.maps
[2] https://plus.google.com/communities/110975300772106415242
[3] 
http://files.kde.org/marble/downloads/android/MarbleMaps-1.1.0_23.apk
[4] https://plus.google.com/109002795119670287274/posts/JBjQEzbWL5w