Torsten Rahn 

Today I have the pleasure to announce that Marble is the first popular virtual globe that ships and visualizes the Behaim Globe. The Behaim Globe is the oldest surviving terrestrial globe on earth. It was created between 1492 and 1493 - yes at the same time when Christopher Columbus made his first voyage towards the west and "discovered" America. This fact makes the Behaim Globe very special and also subject to scientific research: It documents European cartography during that era and it's probably the only historic globe which completely lacks the American continent. These days the Behaim globe can be visited in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, Germany. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum (GNM) has kindly granted the Marble project permission to release the photo scan material of the Behaim Globe under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license and they have supported us in bringing it for the first time to the users of a widely deployed virtual globe: Marble. Right now our users can immediately download the Behaim Globe from inside Marble by entering File->Download Maps (or download it via our maps download website.). Read More

Many pre-university students have participated in Google Code-In (2014) again and for many of them it has been the first opportunity to make contributions to Free Software and Open Source projects. In opposite to Google Summer of Code the GCI program is organized as a worldwide contest where students at the age of 13-17 years take the challenge to complete as many software development tasks from their mentor organizations as possible. These software development tasks are provided by Open Source Projects that are approved as mentor organizations. And at the end of 2014 KDE has participated as a mentor organization for the fifth year. The most recent edition of Google Code-In, GCI 2014 has again been very successful: As Heena Mahour described in her Google Code-in 2014 wrap up with KDE there have been more than 277 tasks created by KDE mentors for the students which covered all aspects of the software development cycle and which ranged from creating source code to documentation, research, quality assurance and user interface tasks. It was amazing to see how the students solved nearly all of them and helped to improve KDE applications significantly. As in previous years the top 24 performers became Grand Prize Winners and won a trip to Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California! In the KDE community the Marble Virtual Globe developers are usually actively involved with GSOC and GCI mentorship. Two of our students - Mikhail Ivchenko and Ilya Kowalewski - have made extraordinary contributions to Marble: They had worked very hard and contributed several important features to Marble - see e.g. Mikhail's blog post about the Tour (don't miss to watch the video!) and Ilya's blog about the Measure Tool improvements. And since they also earned most points they became Grand Prize Winners. This year I was the happy one who went to Mountain View as a KDE mentor between June 7-10. And the trip was a great opportunity to learn more about the other mentors and the winning students (they were accompanied by a parent each) and to share more about our Free Software work in the KDE project. The Grand Prize Winner trip was lovingly organized by Stephanie Taylor and other members of the Google Open Source Programs Office: It began with a meet-and-greet event on Sunday evening in San Francisco to get to know everyone. On Monday we visited Googleplex in Mountain View. And on Tuesday we had a fun day in San Francisco where we had the choice to visit the Exploratorium, Alcatraz or went on a Segway tour through San Francisco. Being a science guy I picked the Exploratorium. On Wednesday it was time to say goodbye already after enjoying another round of Googler talks, delicious food and swags at the Google San Francisco Office. The whole experience was just awesome and I'd like to thank Stephanie, Carol, Cat and all the other Googlers for organizing this event and for giving us the opportunity to join it.

Google Summer of Code application deadline is just a bit more than 24 hours away and we are still looking for highly motivated students to work on a Marble Virtual Globe project this summer. Tomorrow is a holiday in many countries, so you might still have some time for the application. Make sure you file your application not later than tomorrow at 19:00 UTC. The last project topic for GSoC that I'll cover is "OpenGL support for Marble": You might ask: Why OpenGL? Doesn't Marble make use of OpenGL already? No it doesn't. Marble currently uses it's own software rendering to provide the different projections. Both texture and vector data are fully rendered in software by default. This works reasonably fast on most devices, but compromises must be made with respect to the map quality. OpenGL, however, offers higher-quality results, is more state-of-the-art and perhaps helps to reduce power consumption on mobile devices. It therefore makes sense to introduce an OpenGL mode in addition to the sotware rendering mode in Marble (the user should be able to choose between software rendering or OpenGL). The main task is to refactor the Marble codebase such that both the software rendering and the future OpenGL code share as much code as possible. In particular, visibility control (which objects should be rendered according to the current view parameters) should be factored out into separate classes, such that they can be reused in the OpenGL mode. Initially the primary focus will be about replicating the current feature set and behavior of Marble. So the globe would still be browsed in looking top-down. Later on one could extend Marble and introduce bird-view, camera flights and "real" mountains and "real" 3D buildings. Bernhard Beschow created an initial prototype of the OpenGL mode in an experimental branch already. You can look up more details about this prototype in his blog. Here is the video and a screenshot: Marble - OpenGL Prototype Since then Bernhard has partially prepared the current Marble master branch for inclusion of OpenGL. But there are still lots of missing bits and pieces in order to have the actual introduction of OpenGL inside Marble. Expected Results for this project: duty: refactored code that separates rendering from visibility management "icing": an OpenGL mode If you are interested in this wonderful project then you should act quickly: Deadline for applications is on Friday, April 6th, 2012m 19:00 UTC. Apart from the usual GSoC student application guidelines your application should: describe the benefit of the feature from a user's perspective (including self-created mock-ups and screenshots) provide a rough technical explanation in your own words what the project will be about. state why you are the best person to master this project. So if you are a student then we are looking forward to your application! Don't hesitate to ask us any questions.

Google Summer of Code application deadline is near and we are still looking for highly motivated students to work on a Marble Virtual Globe project this summer. This is a follow-up of yesterday's blog about OpenStreetMap vector rendering with tiling support. Today I'd like to describe another important feature that we'd like to see covered as a GSoC project. In terms of technology this project is very similar to the "OpenStreetMap vector rendering with tiling support" topic. In fact if you applied for that project already then you might want to apply for this one as well if you want to increase your chances: The topographic "Atlas" map is the oldest map theme featured by our Marble Virtual Globe. The original aim behind the Atlas map was to create a quite detailed map from very little data. The data would get shipped together with the Marble application for offline usage. Read More

Google Summer of Code application deadline is near and we are still looking for highly motivated students to work on a Marble Virtual Globe project this summer. One of our favorite topics is "OpenStreetMap vector rendering with tiling support". And in this blog I'd like to describe our current ideas about this interesting subject a bit more in detail: Basically all the maps displayed by Marble are based on bitmap texture data. Some of these maps even consist of multiple texture layers. On top of these texture layers we display further content like placemarks and possibly even simple geometries (like GPX or KML data). For displaying this bitmap texture data efficiently we are making use of the popular concept of QuadTiles: the data is arranged in different zoom levels. Read More

The European Space Agency is organizing ESA Summer of Code in Space 2011. And Marble and KStars have just been accepted as mentor organizations! Thanks a lot ESA, this is terrific news! The students application period starts today! And the schedule is tight: The deadline for applications is on July 27th, 11:00 AM (UTC) - that's about in a week! So if you're a student and if you'd like to participate then please hurry up and check the FAQ - especially the paragraph about eligibility pick a project from the ideas page (or suggest your own project) fill out and submit the application form for students. If you have any question, you can refer to the documentation center or write to the public SOCIS mailing list. If you have a question regarding Marble or KStars ideas just ask on our mailing lists (kstars-devel@kde.org and marble-devel@kde.org). And remember: In space no one can hear you code.

Have you considered contributing to the Marble (Virtual Globe) yet? The Voice of Marble contest is about to end in 8 days, so you could make use of your weekend by contributing: Read More

The new year 2011 has just started and it looks very, very promising for Marble: According to the Release Schedule "KDE Software Compilation (SC) 4.6" will get released with Marble 1.0 in about two weeks. This will be an exciting release which will introduce largely extended worldwide Routing support (Online and Offline), Bookmarks, QML bindings for libMarble, official support for the Nokia N900 / Maemo platform and too many other things to mention! With our usual release cycle the next big milestone would be Marble 1.2 which will be released together with KDE SC 4.7 (Summer 2011). We have hopes that this might introduce the first steps towards an OpenGL mode for Marble and lots of other bigger framework changes. For all Marble addicts we have even better news: Google Code-In has just been successfully completed and the students who focussed on Marble tasks did some marbleous, amazing work! Utku Aydın for example created some great new functionality for Marble: An Earthquake plugin which visualizes earthquakes in realtime via geonames.org A Social Contacts plugin which uses OpenDesktop.org to display your friends on the Marble globe. And a Map Creation Wizard that allows you to create your own maps (e.g. using ready made images, a WMS Server or a Server Url) and prepares them for upload and contribution to the Marble map servers. Really cool stuff! Read all about it in Utku's blog! Read More

The Marble Sprint Weekend is about to start at the basysKom Office in Nuremberg. If you're around and if you're curious about development of the Marble Virtual Globe then don't hesitate to join us. This is your best chance to get involved! We'll have lots of interesting topics about Marble presented on Saturday. See our Marble Sprint Wiki for more information. Thanks go to the KDE e.V. and basysKom for sponsoring this event. In other news Peregrine got released today! See the basysKom announcement. Peregrine is a crossplatform real-time communication client that integrates all daily needed communication services for VoIP, Video and Chat in one solution. I'll cover this release and project more extensively in a different blog entry.

Marble 0.10.0 has been released as a major update last week together with KDE SC 4.5. As a user you might be interested in our Visual ChangeLog which is also available in spanish over at muylinux.com. But Marble is also a library. So it can be used as a widget in other applications. Today I'd like to show you how. In our previous tutorial I already introduced you to the very first steps of Qt Programming and Marble Programming. Now the last few Summer days in Germany have been rather rainy. So in the second part of our tutorial I'd like to show you how to create a weather map! Creating a weather map Read More

Marble 0.10 was released on August 10th, 2010. It is part of the KDE 4.5 Software Compilation. In the good tradition of recent years, we have collected those changes directly visible to the user. Unfortunately we were a bit late with our visual changelog for the release. So please enjoy looking over the new and noteworthy: Read More

Last weekend I received a postal package that contained a classroom atlas from Austria: the Neuer Kozenn Atlas. Inside there was a nice shiny CD with the title GEOTHEK Schulatlas, Version 1.1 Digitaler Weltatlas. The publisher of this atlas and its software is Ed. Hölzel. Read More

In a few hours KDE 4.5 will be released. And together with it the new version of our Virtual Globe and Map Widget Marble. The new release Marble 0.10.0 will bring lots of additional features (Routing, Tile-Bulk-Download, Multiple Layers, initial WMS support and a lot more) - many of them related to OpenStreetMap. Of course development on the next release has started already: Dennis Nienhüser and Niko Sams have added Worldwide and Offline Routing support to Marble using Gosmore and Routino. In other news the spanish Linux Magazine has published a really nice article by Tim Schürmann about Marble the application: "¡MARBILLOSO! Marble se ha convertido en una alternativa interesante a Google Earth, y funciona sin conexión a Internet. Read More

The student application deadline for Google Summer of Code 2010 is near: So if you plan to submit an application for a Marble project then it needs to arrive no later than April 9, 19:00 UTC. I have just added a few more ideas to the idea page: OpenDesktop.org support and Panorama support. So now in total there are five Marble ideas listed on our idea page: Time Support for Marble More online plugins for Marble Enhanced KML support for Marble Marble To Go (Navigation Mode) Panoramic Picture Support in Marble ("StreetView") Of course this isn't the limit, so if you come up with another great idea don't hesitate to apply for it. In other news we've just created a Marble Facebook Group for all users of Marble and Facebook. Join us! Join the Marble Community!

Just recently my blog got syndicated by Planet OSGeo. So I'd like to take the opportunity and say "Hello" to all readers and I'd like to thank for the warm welcome! Read More

We've recently extended our Marble Wiki to include more documentation about how you can participate in Marble development. Here are a few possible jobs for a start: If you are an artist or interested in historical world maps you can help us to improve our "Historic Maps" library: Magnus Valle ("wiscados" on #kde-edu) has done some great work in this area (resulting in the Historic Map that comes with Marble 0.7). Find out here how you are able to take part in this. For source code aficionados we have lots and lots of JuniorJobs for Marble. You can have a look at our How to become a Marble Developer page to find out how to tackle those. If you're a student and you are still looking for a Google Summer of Code 2009 topic, then you can either look at the KDE ideas page or you look at Wikipedia's fine article about Virtual Globes. They got a nice comparison matrix there which even includes Marble. There are still a few red "No" marks there which might help you to get an idea for your Marble topic for the Google Summer of Code application (like e.g. Movie Maker, Guides, Planetarium, etc.). Just make sure that you don't work on "Imagery of other planets" as Marble already has got this feature since Marble 0.7 (the author of the article just hasn't updated the page yet and I myself don't want to edit such wikipedia pages due to my obvious bias ;-) If you'd like to help us or have questions regarding Marble, just join us on IRC ( channel #kde-edu on irc.kde.org ) or write an e-mail to marble-devel@kde.org.

KDE 4.2 is in bug fixing mode and so is Marble. Time to have a look at things that got implemented right in time for Marble 0.7: Henry de Valence has been one of the most active Marble core developers during the last few months: He has implemented several exciting Marble features already. Read More

Shortly after the Marble OpenStreetMap integration I'm happy to report that Simon Schmeisser has managed to integrate Marble as a Flake Shape into KPresenter. As a flake shape you can change the map according to your liking even after it has been embedded into the KOffice application. So it's not just a simple image but rather a component that allows the user to adjust the content: Which other Free Software office application has a virtual globe that it can embedd into the documents across plattforms? So that adds another successful application of KDE technology to Marble's capabilities: It's only a few weeks ago that our weather man Henry de Valence has started to work on a Marble WorldClock plasmoid: Of course apart from a Marble Qt Designer Plugin and the Marble KPart (which gets used by the Marble Desktop application itself) you can use the MarbleWidget in your very own application -- like Gilles Caullier has done for Digikam: The Marble Widget has no KDE ties, so even if your application uses only Qt you can still take advantage of Marble. So what's the next showcase that people will come up with? A Marble Netscape Plugin? I'm curious. In other news Shashank Singh has just joined us for GSoC 2008 and will provide Panoramio support for Marble. Welcome Shashank! Right now the Marble Team is heavily working towards KDE 4.1 Beta2: Jens-Michael is working on further improving Marble OpenStreetMap support, Inge is working on the Mercator Projection, Patrick is working on further improving KML for his GSoC 2008 project (which actually deals with vector rendering in Marble), Claudiu is working on his Satellite Plugin and Henry is working on texture colorization and Temperature / Precipitation maps. I'll continue to work on GeoPainter and Marble's new plugin architecture which will enable other developers to write Qt-Plugins for Marble to render their own layers and their own data. These are exciting times for Marble. Can you feel the Earth spinning?

The hero of the current Marble KDE 4.1 Beta1 release is Jens-Michael Hoffmann: He has successfully worked on getting OpenStreetMap integrated into Marble and KDE 4.1! This means that once you start our free software virtual globe and select "OpenStreetMap" as a theme then Marble will directly start to download OpenStreetMap tiles from the OpenStreetMap server: If you want to try it you can either wait for KDE 4.1 Beta1 packages to appear on the KDE Website next week. Or you start to compile current Marble SVN yourself. It's pretty easy: You only need just Qt 4.3 (or 4.4), or alternatively KDE >= 4.0 and Qt >= 4.3 including headers. Then you can start to build Marble according to our HOWTO. Once you have compiled Marble from current SVN you can start it either from the menu or from the commandline. You'll be greeted by our globe. If everything went well, you'll see that Marble now features a starry sky plugin (notice the constellation "Orion" right next to the earth in the following screenshot): If you have compiled the KDE version then you can adjust the quality settings for "Still image" and "During animations". We'd suggest that you use "High" for "Still image" and "Low" for "During animations" however you can adjust the values according to the performance of your hardware. Read More

If you're a student and if you're still searching for a suitable GSoC 2008 idea then Marble might offer a chance to participate in a young, vivid and interesting project. We suggest that you have a look at the Google Summer of Code Ideas page. There are especially three ideas which seem to be exciting and very important: Vector Tiles: We'd like to see a similar concept implemented for all geographical features as the one we are using for Textures: Usage of tiles. Especially for vectors this would be interesting as we could live render e.g. Open Street Map or VMap 0 data. Panoramio/Wikipedia photo support: This would enable Marble to show thumbnails from georeferenced photos such as those from Panoramio, Wikipedia (or whatever image source is suggested by the applicant). Technically this work would extend Marble's KML support (which is currently being ported to a new QXmlStreamReader based framework). OSM Annotations: This project was suggested by Adriaan de Groot and Armijn Hemel and is meant to provide on-screen OSM Annotation support. Of course providing OpenStreetMap support is an important goal for Marble and the suggestions for this idea seem pretty reasonable and realistic for the given timeframe (and dealing with UMPC devices seems to promise lots of fun). Of course we appreciate any other ideas for Marble development as well. Creative ideas get extra bonus points. If you want to find out what Marble Development is about then I recommend that you check out my "Marble's Secrets" blog entries: Part I was a Do-It-Yourself course about creating maps for Marble. We've seen how Marble manages to even display features such as aerial photos or OpenStreetMap. Part II showed how Marble paints the different map layers. We've also seen why Marble only needs very little disk space and memory for its default map - making it an ideal choice for solutions that involve little hardware resources (like the Asus EeePC and the OLPC). Part III looks beyond Marble's offline mode: It describes how Marble fetches its data from the internet. But hurry up: Deadline for GSoC 2008 student applications is on Monday! For help or questions you can join us on IRC ( irc.kde.org, #kde-edu ) or send a mail to our mailing list.

I hope that everybody who celebrated Easter has enjoyed some pleasant days (well and of course everybody else, too ... ;-). Recently I've received a few e-mails from Thomas Hartmann who works in Trolltech's Qt/WinCE team. Thomas has started to port Marble to Windows CE after I had told him about Marble during the KDE 4 satellite launch event in Berlin. After having seen a few screenshots of Marble running on Qtopia this is the fifth plattform apart from Marble on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux/Solaris/Unix. The high portability of Marble is due to the fact that Marble doesn't have any dependencies apart from Qt 4 itself (and it doesn't use OpenGL). So you don't even need to have KDE 4 installed to run Marble. However for users the KDE frontend is very much recommended as it has a few extra features that the Qt4-only frontend doesn't offer: like e.g. GetHotNewStuff support. The fact that Qt offers the same API across plattforms (unlike other toolkits) has certainly helped a lot to make the Windows CE port possible. Of course Thomas had to strip down Marble due to the 32 MB memory limit, so the initial vector data isn't as detailed as for the desktop version (we hope that we'll find a GSoC 2008 student who will volunteer to implement vector tiles for Marble): Thomas also created two youtube videos which show Marble on a Dell Axim X51v. The result is pretty impressive given that this PDA is using an XScale/ARM processor (which doesn't provide hardware support for floating point instructions):

This Wednesday Marble got fully translated to Czech (thanks to Vít Pelčák) - including some fixes to the localized city names in the Czech Republic (thanks to Karel Volný). Recently I've looked closer at the KDE Localization Statistics which seem to have improved a lot during the last few months. What has become more and more apparent to me is the fact that Marble might soon be the virtual globe that has the best and most translated GUI on this marbleous planet. Ok, this shouldn't exactly be the primary concern of a tool like this (Yes, I hear you asking for more and better maps instead and we are working on that as well). Caption: Marble's UI translated to Chinese (Credits for the Screenshot: John Smith). Read More

Today we'll finish our first trilogy about Marble Desktop Globe: Part I was a Do-It-Yourself course about creating maps for Marble. We've seen how Marble manages to even display features such as aerial photos or OpenStreetMap. Part II showed how Marble paints the different map layers. We've also seen why Marble only needs very little disk space and memory for its default map - making it an ideal choice for solutions that involve little hardware resources (like the Asus EeePC and the OLPC). In Part III we'll look beyond Marble's offline mode: We'll get to know how Marble fetches its data from the internet. Caption: Left: Creating "KWorldClock 2" in 5 minutes using Marble's Qt Designer Widget Plugin. Note that this is just a proof that this would work today! - Actually Henry de Valence is working on a KWorldClock plasmoid already. Right: Marble showing off a real-time cloud map and Sun Shading with the "Earth At Night" map blended in. By data we mostly refer to texture data. As of version 0.5.x (KDE 4.0) we only support a single texture layer. However this is about to change with the next version of Marble: David Roberts has added support for Sun Shading in Marble. If this wasn't exciting enough he also added a way to have the "Earth at Night" map blended onto the dark side of the earth. This includes a pretty nice Terminator line. On top of that he already added internal support for having real-time clouds as another layer! See the screenshot based on a current build of the Qt-version of Marble pre-0.6-SVN. A really big mosaic of tiles ... Actually I've met a lot of people recently who weren't aware of the fact that Marble downloads further texture data from the internet while browsing the map. On one hand the reason for this misconception is maybe the fact that we only provide very little additional online data right now (about 400 MB). On the other hand the map download is done automatically and very seamlessly in the background, so people will hardly notice. Andrew Manson created a nice YouTube video while he finished his GSoC Project "GPS support for Marble". During the first 1.5 minutes Andrew demonstrates what could be a summary of the "Marble Secrets Part II" hands-on paragraph: the video shows how you can hide and show layers using the legend tab. Watch closely at 1:35 where Andrew zooms into the "Earth at Night" Map: you can see how the map will suddenly show a lot more detail as new data has arrived on the computer in the background. Keep watching and you'll see the same happening with the "Satellite View" map. From Part I we know that internally the current map gets provided at different sizes - each size at different resolutions. These different map "levels" are split into 675x675 pixel tiles each. Depending on the zoom level only those tiles that are actually visible will get loaded into the physical memory ("RAM") of our computer. This mechanism keeps physical memory consumption low. For each tile Marble will check first whether it's available in the physical memory's Tile Cache (yes, you were about to suggest this feature, but we got it implemented already!). If it's not available in the "Tile Cache" Marble will try to load it from the local hard disc. In case it's not there Marble will schedule the tile for download in Marble's very own HttpDownloadManager. But wait - what should we display in the meantime while there is no matching tile available? After all due to the way Marble works we can't simply "omit" the missing tile! As a cheap but smart workaround Marble just scales up the tile at the biggest zoom level that is locally available for this particular place. It will then just cut out the area that is needed and will use this handcrafted DIY-tile as a temporary replacement until the "real" data arrives. In the meantime the HttpDownloadManager will contact the server and will look for the tile in question (e.g. it might look for this one ) . It's only convenient that on the server all the tiles get stored in the very same directory hierarchy as on the local hard disc: {marble-data-base-url}/maps/earth/{theme}/{level}/{row}/{row}_{column}.jpg So Marble will fetch the tile from the server and will store it locally on the hard disc - again sticking to the given tile directory hierarchy. Once it got stored locally Marble will update the temporary data of the texture tile to match the "real" data. This mechanism works pretty well already. The HttpDownloadManager is also used to download the Wikipedia webpages that get displayed if you left-click on city labels or symbols. If you're a real GIS person you might wonder whether it's possible to just replace this HttpDownloadManager with something "more sane" - like an enterprise database that has this data stored already. Yes, a suitable solution might be available in marble/src/lib/MarbleWidget.{cpp,h} where you'll find a method called: void MarbleWidget::setDownloadManager( HttpDownloadManager *downloadManager ); (soon to be changed to "AbstractTileProvider"). Just replace the HttpDownloadManager pointer with a pointer to your very own custom TileProvider class. Get Hot New Maps ... But what if you don't just want to zoom into maps that exist on your hard disc already. What if you want new maps on your computer? DXS to rescue! DXS is the successor of "Get Hot New Stuff (GHNS)". It's a web service that allows applications to download and install data from the Internet in one single click. So if you have the KDE 4 version of Marble installed then you can simply choose the "File" menu and pick "Get New Data ..." there. A dialog will appear that will allow you to download further completely new maps. Usually the maps that get downloaded via DXS only consist of a single tarball. The tarball has a size of a few Megabytes, contains a .dgml-file and might either have an installmap or pre-tiled data. The beauty is that once the .dgml file and a few base tiles are in place Marble can start again to look for further tiles on the server. But why doesn't Marble just download all the tiles from the server in a single download? Well, Blue Marble Next Generation is the most comprehensive free satellite map that covers the whole earth at a resolution of 500 meters per pixel. And this map takes about 350 Megabytes on the server already. With increasing resolution the size occupied on the server will grow exponentially. Even if you cover just the continents at a resolution of up to 30 meters per pixel ( Like NASA's NLT LandSat map does ) then your satellite map will occupy almost 200 Gigabytes on the server! So it's pretty obvious that for an application like Marble it's the best solution to just download the pieces that are actually needed! We plan to provide higher resolution maps on the server in the future. Given that we can't just change the maps easily once we start to provide them, this requires careful planning, so please be patient. If you're using the Qt-only version of Marble then you're out of luck as it doesn't have the DXS feature built-in (It does have the automatic HttpDownloadManager though). You're then on your own and you need to find and install the maps manually. Marble Junior Jobs Today we have several exciting opportunities to let your name enter the CREDITS section in Marble. The "EASY Category" might only take you as little as an hour to complete! To make sure that you won't waste time on a Junior Job ("JJ") while somebody else might already be about to submit a patch you can claim a JJ. Just tell us in the comments section that you have just started to work on it. Please be aware that once you have started time is running up! For reasons of fairness you should send us a preliminary patch within the following 8 hours. This will make your claim permanent for the next few days. Of course the preliminary patch doesn't need to fully solve the problem but it should at least tackle a small part of it. If you don't send us the patch within 8 hours then the JJ will be up for grabs again. I hope this takes away the "uncertainty" whether it's worth to start or not ;-) First however you need to spend 10 minutes to get Marble from the sources and to compile it. You need to check out Marble "trunk". Once that is done you can take the plunge: Category EASY: The Sun Shading feature is only available via a single menu entry in the Qt-Only version of Marble. Please add such a menu entry to the KDE 4 version of Marble: just compile Marble for KDE 4. You need to apply a few changes to marble/src/marble_part.cpp and marble/src/marbleui.rc. Look at the existing menu entries in those files to see how things get implemented. As a reference for the menu name and its position have a look at marble/src/QtMainWindow.cpp. Category EASY: Marble doesn't save or restore the Sun Shading settings. Create a patch that solves this problem. Have a look marble_part.cpp (if you want to implement it for the KDE version of Marble) or have a look at QtMainWindow.cpp (if you want to implement it for the Qt-Only version) to see how it works. Category MEDIUM:: Currently Marble only tries to fetch tiles once. If the server doesn't reply Marble won't retry until Marble gets restarted. Find a solution that will reschedule the tile up to 3x in case of failure. Between the attempts Marble should wait 1 min. before the job gets rescheduled. Relevant classes for this job are marble/src/lib/HttpDownloadManager.{cpp;h} and marble/src/lib/HttpFetchFile.{cpp;h} Category MEDIUM:: This job will take a bit longer: Create a working dialog that will show the Tile Download Status in Marble's queue. The dialog should only be available by starting Marble with a special command line option or through a key stroke. Category HARD:: Marble downloads the tiles and saves them into the user's .marble directory. Until now Marble will never start to delete any local tiles. So the contents in .marble will grow until all tiles got fetched or until the HDD is full. Come up with a solution that will fix this problem. The solution should still preserve the tile directory structure and should work similar to QPixmapCache. Just that in this case the configurable cache is the hard disc. For help or questions you can join us on IRC ( irc.kde.org, #kde-edu ) or send a mail to our mailing list.

In Part I we have seen how easy it is to create your own maps for Marble. We've also seen how this works down to the zoom level of aerial photos or OpenStreetMap. Part II will show how Marble manages to provide the biggest bang for the byte when it comes to providing map data. It outlines how we managed to get the default map squeezed into the 10MB package that the Marble-Qt version gets shipped with. We basically show ... Read More

This is the first part of a new series about Marble. I'll try to address a few frequently asked questions as well as the current status of the development. So stay tuned. If you've ever followed KDE 4 development then you've probably heard about Marble. Marble is a virtual globe which displays the earth. So Marble can be used as a nice digital replacement for your desktop globe at home where you can look up places. But wait! There's more to it: Actually these days Marble can also display flat maps (thanks to Carlos Licea), can show different "map themes" and can serve as a Qt4-widget as well as an application! This means that as a programmer you can use Marble in your very own project as a map widget (License: LGPL). Marble was designed to run on any device and on any operating system supported by Qt4 without any further requirements. You can download the latest version of Marble together with KDE 4.0.1 here (It's part of the KDE-EDU module). How Marble stores texture data Read More

Today when I entered the office I found a welcome present in my mail folder that made my day: David Roberts had sent me a patch to put our Marble Earth directly into the spotlight of our G2V Main-Sequence Star (also known as "sun" among non-astronomers). That's totally awesome because this feature will allow kde-edu users to visualize things like seasons. This feature always has been on my personal TODO but I haven't been brave enough yet to start work on it myself because it deals with the (non-trivial) texture mapping code. So I'm thrilled to see that someone else has started to work on this! Read More

Hi everyone! Since yesterday our Marble Project has got a new mailing list for people who are interested in helping us to develop and promote Marble (and of course for people who use Marble to develop applications). If you're interested in signing up on marble-devel@kde.org you are invited to do so here . If you want to join us on IRC, choose #kde-edu on freenode!

Great news for all people who like the Marble Desktop Globe: Google Summer of Code '07 has started and our vivid KDE community managed to get 40 students accepted - three of them will work on Marble! I've got to admit that I was pretty overwhelmed by the interest people showed in Marble: lots of students have submitted applications that dealt with Marble. Most of the submissions were great so it was pretty hard for sure to choose among them. I hope that in the future we'll be able to get also those people involved whose ideas weren't accepted this time (especially the geocaching idea and the Marble Almanac). Right now I'm happy that now that Inge Wallin of KOffice fame has joined forces we'll have at least five people working on this tiny little project. For GSoC '07 topics will cover KML and GPS support as well as flat 2D projection. In other news there have been lots of Marble packages for Linux -- thanks to Steffen "Whitey" Joeris, Beineri, Chitlesh Goorah and lots of others. However I'd like to point out that Christian Ehrlicher managed to create a Marble install package for Windows which is ready for download (keep in mind that Marble is still in early beta stage, so bugs certainly do exist). Now even if you are forced to use Windows there is no excuse anymore not to try Marble ;-) I hope people don't mind if I post a screenshot:

My last blog entry about Marble dates back a few months already, so I'd like to give a small update: Just recently I added a grid layer and a measure tool. For the curious here's how it looks like: I also started to work on Wikipedia integration which isn't done yet, though. If you're still searching for a Google Summer of Code 2007 idea, then maybe Marble is for you. I suggested several Marble ideas on our new technology portal KDE TechBase. But hurry up, the final deadline for GSoC 2007 application submissions is on Saturday already! BTW: Quaternion SLERPs rock ;-)

You have been using KDE since a few months and you love it so much that you'd like to tell other people about it? You're located in or near Germany and you have some sparetime to offer next week, between March 15-21 ? Then staffing the booth at CeBIT might be a great experience for you! We are still searching for volunteers who would like to help out a day or two to show people the wonderful world of KDE. Technical skills aren't really needed as long as you know how to use KDE! Travel costs as well as accomodation shouldn't be a problem either as you can file a request for reimbursement to the KDE e.V. if you staff the KDE booth. If you'd like to join us, please enter your name and contact information into the Wiki. The CeBIT KDE booth wiki page is also the place where you'll find more information concerning the organization of this year's CeBIT KDE booth. Above you can see a screenshot of Marble showing the city of Hanover where CeBIT takes place. Update: We aren't really in urgent need for people for the weekend anymore. This doesn't mean that we don't welcome you to help out. It just means that we are short on accomodation facilities. The only day where we are currently short on volunteers is the last day of the fair: wednesday March 21st. Read More

Yesterday at 10:00 AM the president of the KDE e.V. Eva Brucherseifer welcomed the audience of the presentation track at the KDE anniversary event at the Technische Akademie Esslingen (TAE) in Ostfildern near Stuttgart, Germany. Keynote speakers were Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project, as well as Klaus Knopper of Knoppix distribution^wfame. During their presentations they looked back at KDE's successful past 10 years and they offered their thoughts about the future of KDE and Free Software. Jono Bacon, Canonical's community manager of Ubuntu / Kubuntu, congratulated KDE with his own presentation about Kubuntu and KDE. Jan Mühlig from Relevantive and Daniel Molkentin, KDE e.V. talked about Usability and KDE 4. In the afternoon the audience of the presentation track met for a group photo and celebrated the event with sparkling wine and a big birthday cake. Even the dragon mascot of the project was present - this time made of marzipan, right on the top of the birthday cake. Right after the afternoon break the presentation track continued with a speech from Heinz-M. Gräsing from the city of Treuchtlingen who gave some insights about the successful migration of Treuchtlingen to KDE. The presentation part of the anniversary was concluded by Knut Yrvin, community manager at Trolltech, who surveyed the KDE 10 Years raffle together with Eva Brucherseifer. As prizes Trolltech offered a Qtopia Greenphone and Open Source Press offered Daniel Molkentin's new book about Qt4 programming. Further KDE people arrived at the TAE in the evening when people met in the cottage for a delicious big "italian" dinner. People clinked glasses later at midnight when the party started to last into the actual anniversary. The KDE project would like to thank the speakers of the presentation track, the Technische Akademie Esslingen, Trolltech and Open Source Press for their support of the whole event. A special "thank you" goes to the confectioner who created that awesome marzipan dragon for the cake ;-) And of course we would like to thank all the people who were not able to attend the event and who sent their nice wishes to the KDE Project.

Yesterday at 10:00 AM the president of the KDE e.V. Eva Brucherseifer welcomed the audience of the presentation track at the KDE anniversary event at the Technische Akademie Esslingen (TAE) in Ostfildern near Stuttgart, Germany. Keynote speakers were Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project, as well as Klaus Knopper of Knoppix distribution^wfame. During their presentations they looked back at KDE's successful past 10 years and they offered their thoughts about the future of KDE and Free Software. Jono Bacon, Canonical's community manager of Ubuntu / Kubuntu, congratulated KDE with his own presentation about Kubuntu and KDE. Jan Mühlig from Relevantive and Daniel Molkentin, KDE e.V. talked about Usability and KDE 4. In the afternoon the audience of the presentation track met for a group photo and celebrated the event with sparkling wine and a big birthday cake. Even the dragon mascot of the project was present - this time made of marzipan, right on the top of the birthday cake. Right after the afternoon break the presentation track continued with a speech from Heinz-M. Gräsing from the city of Treuchtlingen who gave some insights about the successful migration of Treuchtlingen to KDE. The presentation part of the anniversary was concluded by Knut Yrvin, community manager at Trolltech, who surveyed the KDE 10 Years raffle together with Eva Brucherseifer. As prizes Trolltech offered a Qtopia Greenphone and Open Source Press offered Daniel Molkentin's new book about Qt4 programming. Further KDE people arrived at the TAE in the evening when people met in the cottage for a delicious big "italian" dinner. People clinked glasses later at midnight when the party started to last into the actual anniversary. The KDE project would like to thank the speakers of the presentation track, the Technische Akademie Esslingen, Trolltech and Open Source Press for their support of the whole event. A special "thank you" goes to the confectioner who created that awesome marzipan dragon for the cake ;-) And of course we would like to thank all the people who were not able to attend the event and who sent their nice wishes to the KDE Project.

My last last blog entry about Marble covered how Marble is meant to be a generic geographical map widget. It shows the earth as a sphere but doesn't make use of any hardware acceleration (NO OpenGL). So although it might look similar to professional applications like Google Earth or Nasa World Wind it's rather meant to be a small light weight multi purpose widget for KDE. Still Marble comes already with basic Google Earth KML file support and therefore Rainer Endres sat down and did some script magic to convert the data on KDE WorldWide to KML file format.To improve the very basic placemark rendering I added some code to make sure that the labels don't cover each other. So here's the North American KDE Community in all its beauty (Say "hi" to Aaron, Jason, Chani, Annma, Jeff and all the others): Of course the algorithm in place can't compete with more sophisticated automatic label placement methods (like Simulated Annealing), but judging from the result it's a good start - especially given that it's not optimized yet at all. If you want to try it yourself these are the steps that lead to instant success: Make sure you've got SVN and at least Qt 4.1 installed svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/base/marble cd marble ./buildqmake qmake (make sure that the parameter refers to Qt4's qmake - on Kubuntu you have to type in buildqmake qmake-qt4 "). make Now download Rainer's fresh KDE Community KML file and save it in the "marble" directory that you have just created. As a last step execute: bin/marble ./kde-devel-locations.kml and Marble is ready to roll ... Have a look at the fine work of my coworker Slartibartfast and see the Trolls while you're near. And as you're there already don't forget to register for the 10-Years-KDE anniversary party: You might win a Qtopia Greenphone if you do so ;-) . Last but not least I'd like to thank Joseph Wenninger who did an initial port of Marble to cmake right after I had commited Marble to SVN.

KDE is going to celebrate it's 10th anniversary. We'll have a birthday party on Friday, October 13th, 2006 in the Technische Akademie Esslingen in Ostfildern (near Stuttgart). More information is available at: http://events.kde.org/10years If you register by Oct.11, 9:00 UT you'll be entered in the 10-Years-KDE raffle where you could win a brand new Qtopia Greenphone offered by Trolltech! So, hurry up and let us know whether you'll attend! Participation will be possible for everybody who registers in time and we are happy to welcome the winner in our large community of KDE and Qt developers. Of course you also need to attend the event and be present at the raffle ceremony at 16:00 CET in order to qualify for participation. Excluded from the raffle are the members of the party organisation team, the speakers of the event as well as Trolltech's employees.

Yesterday at aKademy I committed Marble to KDE SVN. Marble addresses an issue that exists since long: KDE lacks a generic widget that can be used to display geographical maps. Right now implementation as well as data for maps is duplicated all over SVN. Examples of Use KDE Control Center ( personalisation, timezones ) KDE-EDU ( KGeography, KStars ) KDE-PIM ( KAddressbook, Kopete) KDE-GAMES ( Risk ;-) ) Others: KWorldWatch, KTraceRoute, KDesktop Wallpaper / Screensaver, ... What it's not: Marble neither tries to deliver a 200% academically accurate map that can be used to do science (so don't use it to control nuuukelear power plants) nor does it try to be a Google Earth clone - at least in terms of primary focus. Based on the needs for such a generic widget I imposed the following requirements on the project which should always be kept in mind if you plan to contribute to the project (yes, you are very much welcome to do so): Marble uses a minimal free dataset that can be used offline. Currently the total amount of data that is meant to be shipped is about 5 MB. Marble runs decently without hardware acceleration. It just uses Arthur as a painting backend and does NOT use OpenGL (However it largely benefits from EXA according to some initial testing). Extending it later on to support OpenGL as well shouldn't be hard however I don't consider that the primary focus. Depending on your hardware and the maps being displayed framerate is approximately 5-30 fps. Marble uses vector as well as bitmap data: Currently it uses the very old MWDB II data combined with ETOPO 2, which I will update to current SRTM soon. Marble displays the world map as 3D a sphere, because it's more fun to use and less subject to distortion (So with regard to that it's just like NASA WorldWind, Earth3D and Google Earth) Marble should start up almost instantly. Currently it "cold" starts fully within 2-5 seconds. On each subsequent start it takes about one second. Beyond those requirements Marble already supports "themes" for different topics. In addition to the primary topograpical atlas map there are two other topics: "Earth at Night" and "Satellite View". It's easy to add further topics - I temporarily added a "Moon Theme" on request within 5 minutes of work (it just takes to create two bitmaps and adjust an XML file - try it). Initial support for Google Earth KML files is there already, so it's possible to display placemarks easily. However the whole placemark rendering is still under development so don't complain if within the next two weeks it will fail or be slow. Among the TODO items are: Adding support for downloading data via the internet (that should be a matter of a few hours or days in terms of implementation). This might also offer the chance to display Google Maps data. Making placemarks and polygons accessible, so that they could be referenced to Wikipedia. An "editing mode" which might be used to add placemarks manually or via GPS devices - maybe even working together with efforts like Open Street Map. packaging for different plattforms. As Marble only depends on Qt >=4.1 it's easy to compile it for MS Windows. Daniel Molkentin even created an installable .exe files for it some time ago. If you want to try it these are the steps that lead to instant success: Make sure you've got SVN and at least Qt 4.1 installed svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/base/marble cd marble ./buildqmake qmake (make sure that the parameter refers to Qt4's qmake - on Kubuntu you have to type in buildqmake qmake-qt4 "). make bin/marble For optimal performance it's recommended to add " -O2 -msse " as compile options in marble/src/Makefile once it's generated and recompile. Any suggestions for how to add those options to src.pro directly are appreciated. For each map marble needs some initialization to be done which is a one-time procedure and might take a few seconds on the very first startup (could be circumvented by packaging the resulting data if needed). Have Fun :-)

It's certainly one of those rare cases many open source geeks are dreaming of: An open source developer finds his other half, who is also a passionate open source developer and they both decide to marry each other. Recently this dream came true for Eva and Matze, who have both been involved with the free software project KDE since many years already. For those who don't know them yet: Our queen of hearts Eva also is the president of the KDE e.V., the non-profit organisation that represents KDE developers in legal and financial matters. And both have a job that involves Qt programming. The wedding took place on July 29th, 2006 in the beautiful St. Pankratius church in Mainz-Hechtsheim near Frankfurt. As our mascot Konqi unfortunately wasn't able to attend I was invited instead. So I had the chance to watch the wedding ceremony together with their family and their friends. Thanks to the organizers (Hi Christian!) and thanks to the weather gods the memorable day became even more memorable due to the stunning party afterwards. Matze and Eva have just returned from their honeymoon which they enjoyed on the the island Bali in Indonesia. There they did not only find some quiet moments without KDE but also an internet cafe which was using KDE on Linux of course. The KDE team would like to offer Congratulations and Very Best Wishes on their Marriage.

A new year -- a new chance to spread the word about our favourite desktop environment at linux events. In Germany I already had the pleasure to attend the SkoleLinux Gathering 2006 in the sprawling city of Erkelenz. Carsten Niehaus, author of the popular award-winning chemistry application Kalzium, held a nice Qt 4 Workshop as well as a presentation about KDE-EDU there. After the Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2006 the next stop for a pretty huge event will be CeBIT 2006! Read More

No matter whether it's Tango or Salsa (I'm addicted to Salsa dancing) there are some important things to know about dancing: Of course your attention needs to be 100% on your partner and the enjoyment of dancing that song together. But to be a successful leader it takes more than just trying to force her into something that the "leader" had his heart set on. To make the lady truely shine on the dance-floor a good leader will allow her these essential playful moments of creativity and give her the freedom of expression. - The same is true for icons! ... And leads us directly to the pros & cons of the Tango Project: The good thing about the Tango-specification is that it already uses the common icon names from freedesktop.org which can be shared across desktops. This is a concept which will certainly be shared by all future iconthemes as well (including KDE 4's default iconset Oxygen). The result is a desktop which gives a much more consistent look and feel for the user and iconthemes that are easier to develop. Now we only need to manage to create suggestions for common metaphors for all the iconnames. That way we can pull the whole icontheme thing to enterprise level. People who offer support or write documentation will be able to say stuff like: "To select this part of the screen press the select-icon -- the one with the LASSO depicted" .. and they can be 100% sure that as long as the icontheme is an "enterprise icontheme" (opposed to a fun theme) it will depict a lasso -- no matter which icontheme is chosen. There will always be different iconthemes around as many projects, many distributors and even many free and commercial applications are promoting their own default iconset (think of Linspire's Clear-e, Redhat's Bluecurve, etc. who try to promote their own Visual / Corporate Identity). As mentioned in my introduction: For us leaders there's an important part to make the Tango-specification successful! Let's drop the suggestion for the colorpalette and style! Otherwise all "Tango"-spec-compatible iconthemes will just look like one single icontheme and the freedom of expression for the artists who might want to start a completely new innovative icontheme (maybe based on the visual identity of the respective project) will be close to zero! These days innovation and diversity is the motivation that makes people buy new products and try new stuff. So the way too restrictive rules for colors and styles in Tango would definetely hinder adoptance and would just weaken it as a standard. The whole topic was already covered on freedesktop.org as well as the Appeal-mailinglist. Ideally the Tango-specification will just consist of two requirements that iconthemes will need to fullfill to be a good choice for the default/enterprise: The freedesktop.org common iconname standard and the yet-to-create standard for common metaphors. If we keep this in mind then watching the dancefloor of different iconthemes on kde-look.org will be a joyful experience: diversity will be preserved and a smooth, consistent and beautiful appearance of the desktop will be guaranteed. Read More