[OSM-talk] OSM support in KDE's Marble

[Inge Wallin]

On Wednesday 21 May 2008 16:29:12 Matt Williams wrote:
> Greetings all,
>
> On behalf of Torsten Rahn, I'm relaying the latest news about OSM
> integration into Marble (http://edu.kde.org/marble). I'll let him explain
> it since he knows it best:
>
> "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"
>
> For all the information including screenshots, check out the full article
> at http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3475.

As one of the maintainers of Marble and a contributor to OSM, let me add a few 
things:

1. This example really shows why I dislike web applications.  Marble is much 
much faster in displaying the map, especially when you go back to previously 
visited parts, and zoom in or out.

2. Marble is fully plugin-based, so anybody who knows some C++, can create a 
simple editor á la potlatch. Overlays using e.g. yahoo images should be 
fairly easy. A real editor more complex, but not overly so. Then, on the 
other hand, maybe already Merkaartor is that...

3. Marble is not only an application, it's also an embeddable widget that you 
can use in other applications. So if you want to show some OSM in any 
application, use the marble widget and you're done.

I hope we will see many contributions for OSM.  I already think it's the best 
viewer due to its speed.

	-Inge