Marble News: User Agent changes, Cloud cover, Vectortile Bulk-Download, WMS map themes, Qt6

[Torsten Rahn]

Hello Marbleheads,
 
 
there have been a few notable additions made in the Marble master 
development branch recently:
 
 
- Application developers using Marble should take note that tile downloads 
now communicate the executable name/application name as part of the user 
agent string:
  
Previously the user agent string had been:
 
"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Marble/23.7.70; DesktopDevice; Browser; 
QNamNetworkPlugin)"
 
Since yesterday this has changed to include the executable name (or 
application name). E.g. for the application "LittleNavmap" which is using 
the Marble library the user agent should now become:
 
"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Marble/23.7.70; DesktopDevice; Browser; 
QNamNetworkPlugin; littlenavmap.exe)"
 
This helps us to get a better awareness about causes for tile downloads on 
our servers. But no worries: there are no problems with tile usage on 
servers right now.
 
 
- The DownloadRegionDialog class is now able to also handle vector tiles of 
the Marble Vector OSM map theme. This means that it's now possible to 
bulk-download Marble's vector tiles in advance for Offline usage (limited 
to at max. 100000 tiles, please avoid such high-volume downloads!). For map 
themes that include both a vector layer and a texture layer it's now 
possible to choose between them.
 
 
- The Clouds cover for the Blue Marble Satellite View had been orphaned 
since XPlanet discontinued the free download of the global cloud layer 
(around 2016 IIRC).
 
Since yesterday we got a new "cloud provider" (in the water vapor sense"): 
SSEC RealEarth, UW-Madison has a WMS service which allows us to pull the 
needed data.
Oddly this seems to be the only source on the internet to provide such data 
free of charge. And the most embarassing thing was that this change only 
required a single line of code (plus the addition of the cronjob). 
 
 
- WMS Support: As you might know it's possible to display the data from 
WMS-Servers in Marble. "File -> Create New Map" allows you to create a map 
theme based on arbitrary WMS services. I made a few minor improvements that 
hopefully make this use case more enjoyable. One of the next additions 
might be a selection for the tile projection, further improvements 
regarding license/service terms and possibly selection of a background 
color if this capability is supported.
 
 
In order to port Marble to Qt 6 I will soon perform the following step:
 
- Get rid of support for all Qt versions <= 5.15: This means that all 
defines and APIs that are deprecated for 5.15 will be removed. 
 
If there are any concers with this step, please provide feedback!
 
 
That's all for now!
 
Best regards
Torsten
 
 

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