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.

This Wednesday Marble got fully translated to Czech (thanks to Vít

Today we'll finish our first trilogy about Marble Desktop Globe:

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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:

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!