Marble - Current Release

Visual ChangeLog: Marble 0.9

Marble 0.9 got released on February 9th, 2010. It's part of the KDE 4.4 Software Compilation. This latest release features lots of incremental changes. For new features in earlier versions have a look at prior Visual Changelogs:

• Marble 0.8:

• Marble 0.7:

• Marble 0.6:

Support for Online Services: Weather Plugin, Plugin dialogs

Weather Plugin in Marble

During Google Summer of Code 2009 Bastian Holst improved support for Online Service Plugins. Most notably he added a weather plugin which displays information about the weather on the map for several weather stations. So you can now look up the weather condition, temperature, wind direction and wind speed for any place on earth.

Weather Plugin dialogs in Marble

Bastian Holst also added plugin dialogs to Marble: So it's now possible to easily add a custom "About Dialog" and "Configuration Dialog" for each plugin. Bastian added such dialogs for the Wikipedia Plugin and for the Weather Plugin. He also improved the Wikipedia plugin to show thumbnails of the photos that are displayed in the article. And he made the amount of Wikipedia links shown on the map configurable.

Support custom tile layout Url schemes ("Google Maps Support")

So far the Url schemes supported by Marble have been hardcoded. This allowed support for native Marble maps as well as OpenStreetMap support. But so far there hasn't been any support for arbitrary tile based maps. Now you can easily add support for your favourite map in Marble by creating a dgml/xml text file. Technically this allows for support of Google Maps just by editing a text file. However we feel that it's not legally allowed to ship Google Maps support with Marble. That's one of the reasons why Marble 0.9 doesn't ship with Google Maps support. But of course this feature will allow for easy integration of other maps in the future.

Bernhard Berschow has worked on this feature.

Google Maps in Marble: Example for a custom Url scheme

Google Maps in Marble: Example for a custom Url scheme

Multitouch support for Marble

Marco Martin added multitouch support to Marble:

Multitouch in Marble

Developer Feature: Marble GeoGraphicsView

Since Marble 0.9 the library now features initial support for a Marble GeoGraphicsView. This change adds a framework that is modelled after QGraphicsView. However in addition to a classic QGraphicsView the MarbleGraphicsView adds the following features:

• Support for different projections
• GeoPainter support
• An API focused on geodetic coordinates ("Longitude"/"Latitude") instead of screen positions.

This allows for easy addition of objects to the Marble map in applications. Bastian Holst and Andrew Manson have worked on this framework during Marble 0.9 development.

Performance improvements and more changes under the hood ...

In addition to these major improvements our Marble developers have worked on several other small features, bug fixes and performance improvements:

• Reload map, Speed improvements (Jens Michael Hoffmann)
• Zoom on Double Click / Improved animation support (Dennis Nienhüser)

Last update: 2011-04-29