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

[Inge Wallin]

On Wednesday 21 May 2008 17:18:15 Tom Hughes wrote:
> In message <200805211703.22579.inge at lysator.liu.se>
>
>         Inge Wallin <inge at lysator.liu.se> wrote:
> > On Wednesday 21 May 2008 16:29:12 Matt Williams wrote:
> >> 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.
>
> It is nice. Unfortunately the need to warp the tiles onto the globe
> means that there is a significant reduction in quality over the web
> based version.

I think that's rather an effect of the fact that the zoom is continuous and 
not discrete like in the standard OSM websites. I think that if we only 
allowed the discreet zoom levels, we would get a similar quality.

> > 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...
>
> Well Y! would be hard as you would have to embed a web browser or
> something as you can only access the images via Javascript or Flash.

Really?  How can they prevent us from downloading the tiles directly? 

On the other hand, Qt has very good javascript support, so I think that would 
be possible even without a web browser.

	-Inge